(3)

She swore to her soul and everything else she believed in that she would never end up being one of them.

One of them — those foolish, cotton-headed women who lived to wait. They were everywhere.

Those who would put on dresses and sashes and hats and wait. Those who would eat dinner and sit on their couches in the evening and wait. Those who would go to bed and wake up and look in the mirror everyday at the dust collecting in the creases of their once-beautiful and now gradually aging faces and wait.

For love to sweep them off their feet, for success or great fortune to come billowing their way.

For the 9:30 train.

For some sort of revolution.

For the beginning of their lives.

They disgusted her more than anything, those miserable creatures, helpless to themselves, helpless to fate. But then again, she didn't exactly believe in fate because it was that concept in and of itself that disgusted her. The idea of not having complete control over one's own life, that every premeditated occurrence in one's short life lay in the hands of some invisible, omniscient deity.

No, certainly not. Those were the thoughts of idealists, dreamers. The ones who stayed in bed and dreamed of traversing tumultuous seas, trudging through their lives, never knowing what exactly was reality and what wasn't. And when they were finally able to draw the line, it was too late. They had nothing left but ashes in the fireplace, family in the mausoleums, cold tea dregs, and a few grains left in the hourglass.

She shuddered. Never.

But when she couldn't sleep sometimes, when her eyes tired of staring at screens and books and papers, when she lay in bed listening to her clock tick its way slowly to 4 a.m.,

when troubled thoughts stirred her mind — thoughts of temperamental emotions and half-present lovers — and strange moods made her question her sanity,

she wondered if she really wasn't one of those foolish, waiting women after all.