Waiting For My Life by Linda Pastan
1.
This time tomorrow I’ll have arrived somewhere else. I wonder how empty the road will be, riding into the darkness. I wonder if I’ll feel afraid, but also excited. Like I want to throw my life out the window, at least the one I’ve known, and had. If only for a week.
2.
This time tomorrow I’ll be a stranger, perhaps even to myself. If anything, maybe that’s the kind of freedom that comes with a price I’m willing to pay—shed the skin, shed the self. If only for a while.
3.
I was going through my letters to M., about three years old. I wrote: “…perhaps that is why I am doing this. Perhaps that is why I am working to make room for some changes–because I do not want a small life. And it is quite small, where I am. It is quite small.”
Waiting For My Life
Linda PastanI waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.Sometimes my life coughed and coughed:
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like bird song
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life.
—
This is from Carnival Evening by Linda Pastan, published by W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.
