en attendant…
I……………..I
Photo Courtesy of Signal Fire
Didi and Gogo are still waiting. They will always be waiting. Isn’t that the point. Raise your hand if you don’t know what I’m talking about. Keep your hand up. You may feel as though you are at a crossroads, that there are those roaming the web with a clear road-map but that you stand alone, unsure which way to turn. Keep your hand up. Don’t worry, this is where it all ends.
Photo Credit: Slate.com
You may put your hand down. It is important to mark Samuel Beckett’s stage directions: A Country Road. A Tree. Evening. At the end, Didi and Gogo come to no decisions. They continue to wait.
I sat in my living room in my apartment in Huntington Beach, listening to a friend read her friend’s blog. She read about hours spent on a bus just sitting in the sticky heat, a heat that I, as of yet, had no conception. When they did move, it was never by their own volition, and always towards some declared safe haven. always moving, never arriving. They were arrested, sometimes at gunpoint and sometimes by water, and always asking, “is there anybody out there?”
This was my memory of the hurricane and looking back, I felt like Didi or Gogo. Waiting for the situation to be fixed, to hear how it all turned out.
Photo Credit: Wikepedia
I stand on the levee, in the Bywater, looking across the industrial canal into the lower ninth ward. I climb a tower to get a better look. It is three years later. This is the closest I’ve come.
I find myself waiting for something. It is comfortable to wait. To know that eventually someone will show up and make everything ok
When it rains here, the ghosts come out. It has flooded before and it will flood again. At times, I think that that is what I am waiting for, and I take comfort in believing the world to be antediluvian. The rain says differently, and if you are aware, you can see the ghosts. There are so many of them, waiting.
I understood, even antediluvian. Did you know that gogo is also an acronym of government-owned gov.operated