ON WAITING

Sarah Minor

Minor shares her experiences in waiting. She mentioned several instances like she waited to get older, waited for summer, then waited for summer to run out, waited for Valentines Day, for lunch, for her legs to be long enough. On alternate weekends she held her sisters hand at the state lines Citgo station, where their mothers SUV met our dad's sedan. She would put off wearing her new shoes then waited all afternoon for a text, then she bit her nails in traffic. She also checked every day for a special, unnameable email then stared into the microwave, waiting to recognize herself. She even smoked half a cigarette outside then waited to do the thing I would have promised. When she got in a car accident in Cleveland, she waited to buy another car. She waited on hold with the used car lot, but instead of the light jazz she expected to hear, the line played a series of questions in a friendly mans voice. IF scrolling on a social platform feels like a wait for something unnameable, like for the news to break, for a palate cleanser after the news, for a meme to DM to her sister, for the right animal video to send her finally to bed, its because a sense of waiting online is integral to retaining people's attention there. The disenchanted hustle that shaped her millennial adulthood means that waiting has become funny to subsequent generations, who viscerally equate their own attention with commodity.

ON WAITING

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