Watching, Waiting.

• Kelly Potent, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2008

As I stand waiting, I watch. I watch the creases in the pavement on the floor glimmer with the journeys of tiny ants seeping their way home, struggling to strut past.
I watch the leaves whimpering, hopping and fluttering along the ground chased by an old classified section of a newspaper which is damp and dirty. It looks like it once housed an old man living on the streets.
The men standing next to me watch the same ants and the same leaves and the same newspaper.
We all stand and watch these obscure happenings together.
Our suits flap together with the same gentle gust of wind.
The towering clocks which stand politely in a consistant row, all tick in sync.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Then after 59 ticks comes the tock, announcing another minute passing us by.
Those ticks are all I can hear. All I can bear. The occassional tock would echo past my ears and beyond to where I've never been before, but other then that its silent.
The space between true noise and myself is so lengthy. The air has filtered it for me.
The men standing next to me can't hear any noise either. The men and I only hear what we want to hear and at this moment we only want to hear the time moving.
Still standing on the dirty, hot ground, my shiny black leather shoes make war with my heels. The heat rises between them and my weak heels forfit. In agonising pain I encapsulate withered bits of tissues in my deep pocket and massage them between my index finger and my thumb.
Through my fiery nose I sense the smell of the burning pavement on which I stand. I try to shuffle to relieve the sensation but to the left of me is a bin. Slumming low to the ground it just sits, and waits like the men and I, I suppose. But if I shuffle towards it a foul, unarguable stench which smelt like an old cabbage and brown paper bags would enclose on me and my concentration. I would not risk that so I stay, not moved by my melting skin beneath me.
I simply deal with it and just keep watching, always watching.
What if I was to miss a tick? How could I live on? What would be the point of living if I had missed a moment in my life? It would prove to be such a waste of a life. For what would've I fulfilled?
Gratefull, I hadn't missed a tick. Not one moment of time have I missed, because I have been here this whole time watching.
Those people who walk to go places for no reasons. They are time wasters.
Look at all the time their missing!
They think time is just there. A reminder. They think they have all the time in the world.

They are wasting good times.

I say to those deranged ones, "Listen to me! I have a suit and a red tie! Use time wisely!"

But they laugh at me.

The men and I think the same though. We know we have to watch time or it will slip away like a hand leaves a loved one's when boarding a plane.
They say we are all the same. Black suit, red tie, black brief case. We are really quite different. I am standing here for example, but they are standing there, and that is extremely dissimilar.
I'm not going to change just because they say I'm the same.

As I ponder on that topic my tight, young, fleshy skin losens and droopes from my eyes to my cheeks. I form creases in which ants could pass through if they felt the need. I have a malodorous stench of old wooley jumper and I taste the saltyness of the beach and the breeze it coughs up. Blue, sparkling water caresses my feet cooling them down.

I was forced to change. I was made to change. I have missed a great deal of ticks.
How can that be good?

But now I see.

I see how much time had had wasted.