Waiting
By Frederick J. Blahnik
Waiting…..
She continued waiting…..
And waiting…..
And waiting some more…..
She’d been waiting like this for two years now.
Waiting for WHAT, you’re no doubt asking right now?
That’s right, for WHAT…..???
Waiting for a new heart!
Yes, she was waiting patiently (Usually!) for a new heart to be implanted within her chest cavity, and with a new heart would naturally come a new lease on life. She’d been waiting with her literal life hanging in the balance for far longer now than she cared to remember.
Longer than it takes for dreams to hatch, mature, and climactically die.
Longer than it takes for hope—REAL hope, not the artificial, contrived variety like you see too often in cheesy television series—to shrivel up like a raisin and perish.
Longer than it takes for a longstanding love to flat-out disappear after once blooming iridescently.
Longer than all but a miniscule handful of Homo sapiens brains are hardwired to outwait and out-stubborn adversity.
But then–one beautiful, magnificent, marvelous day–her heroically persistent waiting came to an abrupt end.
That’s right, the seemingly interminable, mentally exhausting waiting she’d been reluctantly but necessarily enduring over the past several years ended abruptly.
And?
And??
AND???
And her waiting was now over—At last, thank God!–because the Job-like, emotionally exhausting waiting that she’d been involuntarily submitting to over the past several years came to a sudden, ruthless end.
Why?
Well…..I know you’d love for me to say a star-crossed youngster died tragically in a motor vehicle accident and their physically spared heart immediately and serendipitously became available for transplantation into our eternally waiting protagonist, but that’s not what happened.
No.
Uh uh.
Rather, the juvenescent woman’s faulty natural heart finally gave out after all the stress it had been forced to endure over the course of a youthful lifetime and it simply stopped working.
That’s right, she died one beautiful, magnificent, marvelous day from “natural” causes—if one can ever seriously say dying from organ failure when youth is still busy flourishing and blossoming is a “natural” phenomenon–and her everlasting, optimistic waiting for a new replacement heart was over at last.
Yes, the waiting was now officially over, and so too was the life of a beatific young human being.
