My Black Tuesday  

Here I am, early hours of Tuesday morning, 5 AM.

Another of these lonely nights were I'm waiting for her wondering where she is.

Sometimes it makes me understand a little more what my parents must have experienced when I started my errands as a teenager. You know you have to trust the object of your affection.

But even if you do trust, you still worry, and you can't help it. Sometimes you'll just wait and let it go and be confident and go to sleep, maybe just waking up once in a while to check your watch.

And some other times you just can't get the bad pictures out of your head. You stepped into this dark zone, the one where you start to get afraid, and it's hard to come back to the light.

She's out there. You're here.


And you do not necessarily feel any anger or sorrow about her being with someone else. Or about her having to leave you at 11pm when you had set up dinner for her and rented a movie because you knew she would be coming back from work around 10, exhausted, starving and silently hoping to have a cheerful evening with you. With no talks, no tears, no fights. Just a DVD (a comedy) and some decent food. Not even a great candle-light dinner, though sometimes she loves it. But just food, the movie, and you. Laughs and smiles.


And then she gets a call, argues a little over the phone, asks for the price, and finally abides to the agency's demands. That's her job.

At this point you don't get mad. You don't hate the customer who called. You don't hate the agency, though you regret she has to go. Well sometimes it happens, you hate them. Dearly. But that's another story...

In this case, you just let it go, you go grab her coat, tell her she looks fine and doesn't need to worry about refreshing or re-doing her makeup, and you give a kiss and smile and wave while she goes out to catch a cab.


You wait 2 hours and you're fine. She said , so it'll take 3.
After 3 hours she should have come home and be here by now.
No calls, no apologies, no explanations.

You don't bitch and moan because sometimes the jobs get extended on demands. She can refuse, but she usually doesn't. She's acting professionally. Though she does it sometimes because she knows it's hard on you.

You wait one more hour.

And another.

And you start to freaking wonder how long you're going to be able to wait until you pick up the phone and give a call to her agency, because you already figured out where it is and what the number is, and ask where the f*ck she was supposed to work tonight because you haven't heard of her.

But you can't make a scene. It's her job, and she's probably fine. And she's probably going to call. At some point, she just can't do it now.

And now she's 4 hours late.
It's 5 AM, and you are scared she's not coming home.


Mom and Dad, if you ever read this, please forgive me...
For these bad nights, for your black Fridays, black Saturdays, black Sundays, black weeks, even black months and even black years. Of waiting. Lost with nothing else but silence and worries.