Waiting
Hannah Wand

My 16-year-old thighs stuck to the blue vinyl airport seat. Sweat dripped into the hollows behind my knees. I should have been doing the chemistry homework that sits in my backpack, or at least reading a book, but I couldn’t force my mind to focus. Too many PA announcements and crying babies. Instead, I swiped animated fruit into lines of three, watching them disappear, new fruit falling to fill its place. An animated gardener jumped for joy on the sidelines. Fantastic job!

The average person spends a total of five years waiting. We wait for buses and planes. We wait for water to boil and lights to turn green and spouses to return home. We wait for life to start or end. All those pauses add up. Five years. 1825 days. 43,800 hours. 157,680,000 ticks of a grandfather clock. Seven percent of a lifetime spent in limbo.

I thought about the bag that sat at my mom’s feet. Its contents. What it looked like passing through the security scanners. How likely it was to spill. We were flying from San Francisco to Nebraska to bury my grandmother’s ashes in the family plot. Her headstone had marked an empty grave for five years while we waited for the right time to travel, then for a pandemic to pass. Even in death, my grandmother couldn’t escape this fate of waiting. 

212 planes take off every minute worldwide. So, while the electronic board in front of me displayed [SFO-OMA: delayed], a million people surged through boarding tunnels and buckled themselves in. A million people ignored a safety video or sipped coffee from a cardboard cup. They traveled for work, family, vacation, pilgrimage, school, exploration, service, fun. I wondered how many sat, suspended in the air, on their way to bury their grandmother too.

I waited for the plane to arrive. I waited to board. I waited to take off. I waited to land. I waited to collect our bags. I waited for the rental car. I waited to arrive at the cemetery. I waited to let out my tears until I was alone in the bathroom of our dark hotel room.

Hannah Wand SC '27