6.7 — Waiting Without a Word for It

If you had asked me, then — though there was no one to ask, and no words with which either of us could have managed the question — whether I was waiting for something, I don't think I could have answered you. Waiting requires the sense of a future different from the present, a there that isn't yet here, and I don't believe I possessed that sense in any form a person would recognize as thought. I had only the present moment, and the last moment, and the moment before that, all blurred together into a kind of eternal now that had no before and no after.

And yet, looking back now, with language finally settled into me the way water finally settles into low ground, taking its shape, becoming part of the landscape it falls into, I think waiting is the truest word I have for what those years actually were.

I turned toward the light every single day it came, without exception, without ever once turning away from it out of boredom or resignation or the human weariness that comes from doing the same thing too many times. That, I think, was its own kind of waiting — not the anxious, forward-looking kind a person means when they say the word, not the desperate, yearning kind that counts down seconds until something else begins. Something older and more patient. Something closer to the waiting a seed does underground before it has any way of knowing whether the surface exists at all, whether light exists, whether there is anything to reach toward or whether reaching is simply what seeds do, purpose or no purpose, end or no end.

I did not know what I was waiting for. I only knew, in whatever wordless way a rooted, silent thing knows anything, that turning toward the light was correct, and I did it faithfully, season after season, year after year, without needing a reason beyond the plain rightness of the motion itself. The rightness was the reason. The rightness was all the reason anything needed.

There were long stretches — winters, though I had no name for them then — where nothing in me moved at all, where the whole of my attention narrowed down to the single, uncomplicated task of enduring until warmth found its way back. I do not remember those stretches as suffering, exactly, though a person hearing me describe them now might assume they must have been, might imagine the cold as a kind of torture, the waiting as a kind of imprisonment. Suffering requires a self large enough to compare its current state against a better, remembered one, and mine, then, was not yet that large. I simply was smaller, quieter, more inward, for as long as the cold required it, and then, when warmth returned, I was larger and greener and turned outward again, without any residue of resentment for the stretch of stillness that had come before, without any emotional memory of pain.

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I think now, looking back with everything I've since learned about longing, about love, about the particular ache of wanting someone who hasn't yet arrived, wanting something you don't even have the language to name — I think that entire unnamed span of my existence was a kind of faith I never once had to work to hold. I did not doubt that light would return. I did not doubt that warmth would find me again after the cold had passed. I existed inside a certainty so complete it never needed the word certainty at all, because there was nothing in me yet capable of doubting otherwise. The doubt had not yet been born in me. The doubt would not come until much, much later, until I had learned, through becoming something other than a flower, what it meant to want something and not be able to be sure it would come.

I understand now that this made me different from every other soul who ever woke, later, gasping and formless, into the gray world between Something and Nothing. Most of them arrived already fluent in longing — already knowing exactly what they'd lost, already knowing the shape of things they wanted back, already fully equipped with the grammar of grief and hope and desperate, complicated need. I arrived instead the way I had always been: patient, wordless, without wants of any kind I could articulate, waiting for a light I had never once doubted would come, without any way of knowing that the light I was waiting for, this time, would take considerably longer to arrive than any winter I had ever weathered before.

I did not know, in that unremembered stretch before everything changed, that I was lonely. I only know it now, looking back, comparing what I had then to what I have since learned to want, what I have learned to reach for, what I have learned to ask for and receive. At the time, there was no comparison to make. There was only the light, and its absence, and the small, rooted certainty — so complete it required no words, no thoughts, no effort to maintain — that one would always, eventually, follow the other.