I have been waiting for all my life.

I wait for the peach that never ripens, the wine that never sets, the lover that never returns. I wait for Persephone to step out from the Underworld, for Demeter’s hand to paint the earth green. I sit in hospitals and train stations, courtrooms and temples. I look for the dove that flies after forty days of flood.

Pearl-white chickweeds bursting through rocky asphalt as my sister and I walk from the bus stop back home. We braid flower crowns and play princess, and we come home bearing armloads of clumsy bouquets to give to our mother. She lets the weeds bathe in an empty jam jar and places them by the kitchen window. I watch them for days after, mesmerized by how the glass could melt slants of light into one rippling shadow.

The day is 24 hours long, yet none of them belong to me.

The right half of my body is too numb and heavy to move, my bladder loose and my lungs just barely breathing. Instead of a loving family by my bedside, I'm chained to a ventilator, a blood pressure monitor and a cardiac telemetry.