Komaba Times Issue 9

by Ran She
illustration Jade Hwang
I’d been waiting now for an hour.
The first ten minutes was nothing. I didn’t even notice it. I didn’t even notice ten
whole minutes had gone past standing outside in the cold. Ten minutes, what’s that?
The next ten minutes, too, was nothing at all. In fact, it was probably I who was mistaken
and had come out to wait at 2pm instead of 2:20pm. That’s right, we probably
had agreed to meet at 2:20pm instead of 2pm. As people do. It was my fault, so so
stupid. Anyway, that was nothing at all, too. Nothing at all.
And then the third ten minutes came and went. And the time became 2:30pm. Thirty
minutes, that was un-unnoticeable. Thirty minutes is half of an hour, and hours make
up the day. Days make up the months, and months make up the years. Sometimes,
a year is a long, long time. But mostly, as you grow older, the years become shorter.
Have I grown older, standing here out in the rain? Who decides that over a year, I
grow older, but over a minute I don’t? Am I not now thirty minutes older than I was
when I first came out to stand outside here?
Forty minutes. When I was in high school we had twenty minute periods, and so the
shortest classes lasted two periods: forty minutes. I could have had a whole biology
class by now. The trendy joke nowadays is that instead of learning useful, applicable
things in high school, you learn that “the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”.
Huh.
Fifty minutes. My left toe is wet. In a greatly misfortune sequence of events, I, pacing
from curb to street, street to curb, up and down, down and up, having miscalculated
one particular step, in a brazen attempt to stride over a puddle collecting over a hollow
in the concrete, with a great small splash, you can figure the rest out yourself. And
now my left toe is wet. It’s not getting any drier standing out here in the rain and the
cold and the wind and the clouds and the grey and the rain. And the cold.
One hour. Still waiting.