The Moment You’ve Been Waiting For

The moment you’ve been waiting for missed its connecting flight out of Dallas/Fort Worth six weeks ago.

The moment you’ve been waiting for is in the middle of a days-long nervous breakdown, barricaded in a bathroom stall in a rest stop — who knows what state or what exit — hungry, scared, half-naked, half-awake, refusing to come out until it’s good and ready.

The moment you’ve been waiting for is happiest when it’s announced by the handsome, whiskey-soaked & disembodied voice on an old, blurry television in some family of four’s living room in the ’80s. The moment you’ve been waiting for is happiest when it’s preceded by an emphatic AND NOW as in AND NOW! THE MOMENT YOU’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR!

The moment you’ve been waiting for is raining while it’s sunny out. The moment you’ve been waiting for is huddled with you under your deck saying “Isn’t this unusual, for it to rain when the sun’s out? How often does this happen?”

The moment you’ve been waiting for is driving a borrowed convertible through a neon, iridescent City Of The Future singing along “And now we meet in an abandoned studio…”

Your niece found the moment you’ve been waiting for at the bottom of a box of cereal but was too shy to tell you and now she’s off in college and you only see her every other Christmas.

The moment you’ve been waiting for draws attention to itself by doing weird shit like eating a tomato as though it were an apple, the juice running down its chin and neck and making an awful mess or walking barefoot through a Target or getting overly familiar with a coworker over text message after midnight.

The moment you’ve been waiting for found a blue sock in your sheets. The moment you’ve been waiting for doesn’t own any blue socks and knows you don’t either. The moment you’ve been waiting for stabs apart a painting you’re especially proud of with a comically large pair of scissors and wraps long strips of canvas around its hands and arms and legs and torso and just walks around like that all the time.

The moment you’ve been waiting for can tell you the exact composition of every planet in our Solar System, including Pluto. It can tell you that Jupiter’s upper atmosphere is 88% hydrogen and 12% helium. It can tell you what would happen to a human body that was suddenly and unexpectedly transported there on a pleasant afternoon in April.

A while back, the moment you’ve been waiting for switched places with you for just one day so it could watch a Cubs game at Wrigley Field with your dad like it had always dreamed of doing. The moment you’ve been waiting for ate its first and last hot dog that afternoon.

The moment you’ve been waiting for is where all the straw wrappers in your car end up, woven together in an intricate display, and taken as a whole they form words so large they can only be understood from outer space. Taken as a whole they read, “I am not a ghost, I am not a ghost, I am not a ghost.”

The moment you’ve been waiting for is the summer mud awaiting your son at the end of a fall from a tree in the backyard. The moment you’ve been waiting for is a wailing, hysterical broken leg in the backseat while you try to distract it with a funny story you heard somewhere.

The moment you’ve been waiting for watched you flirt and drink and dance like an idiot at your friend’s sister’s wedding. The moment you’ve been waiting for followed you to the bathroom after the open bar closed. The moment you’ve been waiting for smiled at you through the mirror while you fixed your hair.

The moment you’ve been waiting for is staying up past your bedtime in your grandparents’ trailer and watching one of those slasher flicks, the ones your mom warned you repeatedly not to watch. The moment you’ve been waiting for is your hands covering your eyes and sneaking glimpses of violent, shadowy scenes through your fingers. The director has framed the moment you’ve been waiting for to appear 7'5" and 350 pounds of impossible muscle and perfect rage. The moment you’ve been waiting for’s weapon of choice is an axe. The axe is being delivered into the moment you’ve been waiting for’s unsuspecting skull so suddenly that you scream and almost wake up your grandpa. The moment you’ve been waiting for is hiding in your closet tonight, you just know it, you just know it, you just know it.

The moment you’ve been waiting for walks right up to the foot of your bed the next morning, leans down, and gently shakes you out of your sleep.