There is an article in the December issue of Oprah about waiting. The author talks about all the time we spend waiting for the various things that we all seem to wait for life to provide and about the mundane types of waiting to: for friends in front of the movies, at the doctor’s office, the check-out line at the supermarket. I didn’t read the whole thing word for word. I skimmed until words jumped out at me and then I read the surrounding sentences and paragraphs. That is about the only way I can read these days. I am waiting for the ability to lose myself in a piece of writing returns. I miss that almost as much as I miss my husband, who I can barely recall as a solid figure anymore. When I was younger and unhappy, I would just read. Find some piece of fiction and lose myself in it for hours. I could project the words onto a screen in my mind and see and hear the characters as though I were sitting in a dark theater for one. It made the waiting bearable. Nothing makes the waiting endurable now. Sometimes writing. But more often everything I find that distracts me from time’s crawl towards – wherever – is just a distraction. Short-lived and disappointing and in the end something that adds to my loneliness instead of lifting it from me. Nearly four and a half years of waiting now and I wonder “what for?”. My life is still something that I live for the benefit of others. My child. My students. My family. I am tired of being a single parent. I wonder why I teach when I am really a writer. I wish I was orphaned. In a month, I will be 43. I was 38 when this journey began and I am more lost than the Hebrews in the desert, but they, at least, had each other.