the waiting game.

Patience has never been one of my virtues. That’s one constant item in my daily prayers. I always ask the Lord to give and teach me patience. And since I always pray for it, the Lord never fails to put me to the test. I don’t mind if it’s something physical – ask me to wait for you, I will. I have always been patient with my friends especially during college. I can wait for hours on end; I wouldn’t give a damn.

But there’s something about emotional waiting. It’s very different from waiting for someone to come. The waiting game is no longer just about sitting in a café and looking at your watch every fifteen minutes. Emotional waiting involves more than time – it doesn’t involve time at all. Okay, let me backtrack a bit.

What does emotional waiting constitute anyway?

Hmm, well. It’s so much like the book By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept. Time isn’t used in the same context as physical waiting. With physical waiting, there is a timeframe concerned. Time is of the essence. With emotional waiting, there’s still the aspect of time but there are no timeframes, you’ll never know when the “time” will come. And because waiting can stretch on till forever, it takes too much from the heart.

Emotional waiting reminds me of the play Waiting for Godot. The play started and ended with two men waiting for someone named Godot under a tree along a country road. They waited for someone who never came.

This is the part of waiting I hate the most. You can be left hanging until you decide to quit. It is not just about waiting for someone, it can be anything. It can be for an opportunity, a goal to be completed, a dream to come true, the list goes on. It can be anything at any given situation.

The painful thing about waiting is that, sometimes, you keep on waiting but you don’t realize that it’s time to stop. And worse, nobody tells us that we should stop. Truth be told, no one really knows when to stop. We just keep on waiting and hoping that one day, the stars would shine for us.

So… Why am I writing about this?

It’s safe to say that I am currently playing the waiting game. I’m not waiting for something tangible, really. I’m waiting for my heart to heal, but the problem is, it gets battered every single day. I don’t know if I can still keep up; I don’t know if my heart can still take it. I don’t know when this will stop. I don’t know a lot of things. I wish I knew, but life’s set up that way.

All I can do is wait.

And wait I do, every single day. I don’t care if it would take a long time. I don’t care if it may never happen.

Along with waiting, I wish that somehow, things would turn differently when the dawn breaks.

And everyday, along with asking for patience and wishing upon some unknown star, I also ask God to hold my heart and keep it from breaking.