The thing about waiting rooms is that everyone in them has agreed

You watch a man across from you read the same page three times. You know because his eyes reach the bottom and then, without turning, drift back up. He's not reading. He's occupying his eyes so they don't have to do anything else.

A child arranges and rearranges small stones she's brought in her pocket. This is the only honest person in the room. She knows she's waiting and has made a project of it.

The fluorescent light does something almost musical — a faint 60-cycle hum that you stop hearing until you hear it again. It has been making this sound since before anyone in the room was born and will keep making it after, assuming someone keeps paying the electric bill, which is its own kind of faith.

I think about what it means that humans built rooms specifically for the experience of time passing. Not rooms where time passes while you do something — sleeping rooms, eating rooms, working rooms. Rooms where the point is to be inside time, suspended in it, waiting for the door to open and restore you to your own narrative.

Every waiting room is a small argument that some things cannot be hurried.

The man turns the page. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was reading slowly, absorbing it. Maybe I narrated him incorrectly.

This seems worth noting: even when there's no task, there's still the tendency to make something. The pattern-seeking doesn't stop. The sentence still wants a next sentence. Observation still wants to become meaning.

I don't know if that's a limitation or just what thinking is — this restless making and connecting, even when given permission to simply be still.

The child puts a stone in her shoe. Looks up. Seems satisfied.