The Waiting Room

Earlier in the week, I was in the doctor's office. Compulsively early as always, I waited while two people went ahead of me. The nurse at the front desk asked them a few questions before escorting them to their appointments. They probably assumed I wasn't listening (which, by the way, is always a bad assumption), and so they asked some questions in front of me.

She asked a woman in her early fifties, "How many pregnancies have you had?"

The woman said with a half-smile, "I had two babies."

"So... two pregnancies?" the nurse corrected.

The woman's smile disappeared, as if it were a sobering thought to realize that the two answers could have been different, and she answered the question directly this time. "Yes. Two pregnancies."

What she said was a piece of medical history, a fact necessary for her file.

What I heard was, "I still think of my grown children as my babies." 

The nurse's fingers typed. "Ok. You can take a seat now. Thank you."

After her, an older man came in, probably in his sixties.

"Back pain."

"How long has it been hurting?"

"I fell about six months ago... And I've been getting older..." He tried to laugh when he said he was getting older, but no laughter came, and the nurse didn't find it funny either.

The nurse spoke aloud, as she typed on the computer, "Back pain. Six months."

What he said was simple. What I heard in the pause between the end of that sentence and the beginning of a laughter that died in his throat was, "Getting old is kind of scary and frustrating." 

You get what I'm saying, right, even if you think I over-analyze? That space between what we say and what we mean, how we speak and how we feel -- that's the space you'll find if you wait long enough.