Iglesia

Waiting is almost always cold. Or at least it seems that way. She can, of course remember times when she has waited in the sunlight or on hot steamy days. But when she thinks of waiting….she shivers. Just some trick of her mind. There is something about waiting to her that always seems cold …..or is it just lonely? Sitting somewhere by yourself. A small girl, waiting with her arms wrapped around her, cold, alone and unhappy. The abject existential aloneness that we all try to avoid at all costs, that feeling of abandonment and separation and resentment we all feel when we are at our lowest points in life. A spiralized descent into a place frost and ice….After a break up or the death of someone close to us, that cold, that chill, that sense of being totally alone in an isolated black bleakness of despair and solitude…a chill of and to the very soul, cold cold cold, and afraid, in the frozen void of the ultimate and final unfightable and undeniable aloneness, deep inside of ourselves. A deep black cold.

Of course it was January in Philadelphia and she was sitting by a broken window, so that may have had something to do with it, too.

But she was definitely cold.

And waiting.

And no longer a small girl. The coffee wasn’t helping much, nor was all the extra clothing, except to make her feel even more removed and barriered off from the world, outside of herself. And making her have to pee….the coffee, that is. The long hours of waiting with nothing to do but watch and listen always took their emotional toll, always….the cold just added to it. It made her even more sedentary than usual, seeking to huddle in on herself and instead of watching, searching instead for some form of inner warmth. She got up and crossed the room to kick the pathetic tiny radiator out of sheer spite. Even her gun was cold against her hip.

Frank snoring from the other room like a sea lion in heat didn’t make her feel less alone, not on the level she was currently working with. Even when she was in bed with Paul, there were still times when the aloneness would creep in….on tiny cats feet, as someone once put it. Even there it got cold, sometimes. Even on hot nights with her whole body pressed up against him after making love, she had felt it. She always wondered if others got cold too. Like that. It was one of those things you can’t ever even really compare with other humans, since degrees of sensation and sensitivity were always subjective. Especially coldness. How cold are you is not a real question, really. She also wondered if being Latina made her colder too. It is one of those things, no other people can tell you. There is just no language for things like that, they only exist inside of us.

Her mind snapped back.

Pinche Tejano gangsters! They could have at least hid out near a fucking Starbucks!

( to be continued )