In Line to Hell

I slosh in the sweat induced sock puddles covering my feet. My watch ceases as a time piece; succeeds as an antagonist. Boredom shifts my weight like a four-foot gymnast anxiously working the balance beam. I beam a supple rouge from my flushed cheeks. A toe-tap. A sigh. The alternate stick and unstick of my rubber soled shoes placates my mind, then annoys. For fleeting seconds I can visualize time passing. I can see it clearly, clownishly standing before me. Clowning me like a birthday clown. The type of clown whose routine causes instant wonderment as to the person’s background and means. It’s the type of wonderment that occupies my inner dialogue a second, seemingly minutes, breaking me from the negative cycle of dwelling on my current linear realities.

We move forward as a collective. Guide ropes usher us through systematically meandering corridors. We creep at a crawl’s pace. Awkwardly leering at the various creeps crawling by at their creep’s pace. I hear a cough behind me, a sigh elsewhere. Frustration echoes like a scream in a guano-filled cave. I shout internally. It reverberates. The sharp sound pings my ears like the high pitched tone of a wayward fax send. I grimace. The line groans, moves forward.

The fact that the beginning of the line, the end of my wait, is within sight counter-intuitively adds to the anxiety a stagnant line can create. Now that I can see the front of the line, movement is a measurable and quantifiable data. If one foot, mine, equals nine-inches, and I’ve moved three steps in the last thirty minutes, then it would take four days to stand in line for a mile.

I’m with someone. She stands to my left and leans in intermittently flashing puppy-dog eyes. I respond with sympathetic face gestures. Her experience is the same as mine. She stands in the same line. We’re both tapped into the current of frustration that is pulsing up and down with the electricity of the third rail. However, the collective experience is trumped by the interminable inner experience ruling my every breath. She stands alone. As I do. Together.

Ding! Or was it Ting? I analyze the next-bell feverishly. I watch the light, light – a secondary announcement curtly preceded by the Ding! The light-bulb above the attendant’s cage catches my gaze. Line-lulled, catatonic, my thought process has an outward manifestation like a book with the first chapter on its cover. No reaction. Delayed reaction. Action. Next. Ding! Shuffle. Shuffle. Wait.

I peer behind me at my peers. They’re peers in the way traffic school students are peers. They’re peers in the way that a condo association is comprised of peers. I peer back over my shoulder but my view is obstructed by light. The front of the line is lit like a late night talk show or a play. The illumination of the front of the line is at expense of the back. I shade my eyes relentlessly and do a double take. It’s chin-scratchingly perplexing. As far as I can tell I’m at once in the front and the back of the line. Those ahead of me have been mercifully moved through the way-station between where they are and where they’re headed. Those behind me have been shaded out of my waking life. I’m next, standing both at the front and the back of the line. Bing!

I approach the attendant. She is behind glass. Her movement is like watching water evaporate. Her features are horrid. She’s waist deep in indifference. She wears a nametag inscribed clerk. She doesn’t look a day younger than eighty. Neither does her cleavage. My toe cracks. My knee aches. My back howls. I walk toward the attendant like I’m walking to my coffin with a pillow in hand and a night-cap on my head. I’ve waited in perpetuity; perpetually pushing towards the completion of my to-do list. A list of one. A lengthy line of many.

I feign a smile. She doesn’t look up. Her gum pops. Her glasses sit at the end of her nose like a basketball sitting on the end of the rim. She is still life in action. A painting in motion. I make eye contact only to instigate some recognition. She raises a brow and flips a palm. That was as much of an inquisition as I could expect. She would wait for me to state my business until the cows came home, assuming they were traveling by line. Finally, after a lifetime passes, I lean in and say, “I’d like to send this certified.”