The Waiting Room

She clicks her pen incessantly.  It’s such an ingrained habit that she doesn’t even know that she’s doing it.

He noticed, though.

There were others in the waiting room.  Some wearing masks, some looking hung over, and one who stared mindlessly at her own twiddling fingers.  The clicking caught his attention first, but the woman clack click clacking was what endlessly held it.

She held her office on her lap.  She alternated between clack click clacking and putting her pen between her rosebud lips.   Her dark chocolate hair was up in a loose bun, and she wore black rimmed glasses.   Her laptop hummed a ditty while she waited.  And clacked.  And thought about what she was going to type next.  And clicked.

A series of urgent click clacks piggy-backed on top of each other.  She anxiously uncrossed one leg just to cross over the other.  Looking up defeated, she catches him watching her.

Their eyes lock.

“A not terribly attractive man.  Staring at me,” she thinks.

He looks away as quickly as it registers that she’s looking right back at him.

They both synchronously turn their focus back to themselves, like a paper cootie catcher, morphing back into withdrawn–no, inwardly drawn–in-divid-uals.  People.  Busy people, sitting in a simple waiting room.   They both pull themselves inwards, sucking in and sitting up straighter, and they both recollect, with the reminder, the awareness that they are not alone in this busy universe.

She clicks. And then she clacks.  Slowly now.  Self-consciously.

He shifts his weight from the back of one thigh to the other.  He is tired of waiting.

His glance, almost imperceptibly, entirely uncontrollably, sparks back to her.

He catches her staring at him.

With a flash, they are both drawn into themselves again.

Like sea anemones.

Like turtles.

Self-focused.  Self-aware.  Self-conscious.

Seconds tick by within the clock that is strangely audible, even in this busy waiting room.

Seconds as long as years.  Click.  Clack. Click.  He wonders if the clicks and clacks are really the seconds, or if they’re just more of her nervous energy, funneled into an annoying audible evidence.  Click.  Clack. Click. Clack. Click.

He can not take it much longer.

The energy, the anxiety, the self-conscious awareness that he has been caught staring and is now the center of the universe– at least the center of the universe that is this waiting room– is closing in upon him so furiously that he must stand and escape this place… he throws himself upward, shot like a bullet from a gun, upright, arms out in a monster bear hug-like stretch, while the nurse simultaneously calls out his name.

“Paul!”

The man twists and grabs his briefcase, twirls around with it and quickly, urgently flings himself towards the back room.

“Paul” the woman thinks.  She rolls the name across her mind’s lips.

It tasted sweet to her.

“Paul.”