The last time someone waited for me

There was a time when someone always waited for me. Not in the grand and cinematic way that movies likes to show. No dramatic reunions and no running through airports. It was just small and ordinary waiting.

My mother standing near the gate when school ended. My grandfather sitting on the verrenda pretending to read the newspaper while secretary looking down the road every few minutes. My friend saving me a seat in class. Someone keeping the last piece of cake because they knew I liked it.

Back then I never noticed these things. Waiting seems natural. Permenent. Like sunlight arriving every morning. I thought people will always have time and I thought that they would always have the patience and I thought that they would always be there. Years passed quietly. The way years often do.

One day I returned home later than usual and noticed my mother has stopped waiting near the gate and that she had learned that I would arrive eventually. Life had given other things to do for the people around you. It always does.

My grandfather's chair became empty long before I understand what that emptiness meant. My friends found new friend circle and went new cities and had new responsibilities. Then the seat beside them was no longer reserved.

Nobody announced these changes. There was no farewell speech for the end of waiting. It simply faded. Like an old paragraph losing its colors and like a song that becomes harder to remember and like footprint disappearing from wet sand. Sometimes I wonder how many acts of love I missed bc they arrive disguised as old and ordinary normal habits.

About how many people showed affection not through words but through patience. Waiting and looking out of the window and checking the time and keeping the light on and leaving a message unanswered bc they hoped that I would call instead.

Love is rarely loud and most of the time it sits quietly in the background and asking for nothing. And perhaps waiting is one of its purest form.

These days I catch myself becoming the one who waits like I wait for messages and for calls and for people who say that they are five minutes away.

I wait for old friends to remember conversation that meant the world to me. I wait for version of people that no longer exist. And in those moment I finally understand what all those years of waiting must have felt like. It was never about the hope and it was not about the hope.

It was the gentle belief that someone mattered enough to come back to us. Maybe growing up is realising that time changes everyone.

The people who once waited for us cannot always keep waiting forever. But their waiting leaves something behind. A quiet warth and a memory and a remainder that at some point of our life we were deeply loved in ways we never fully noticed. And perhaps the saddest thing is not that people stopped waiting. It is realising how precious theor waiting was only after is gone.