I nearly failed algebra in high school. The teacher was constantly confiscating things from me: novels, twice the same notebook filled with dreamy scribblings rather than equations. I could not wrap my head around the abstraction of it all, the mysterious symbols that had no quantity. Solve for X, the unknown factor. I hated not knowing. And that has stayed true, more than a decade later.
I think most people mistake my relative quiet for patience. Patience, I think, is what you have with a known factor. Being familiar with the endpoint, or even with the length of the delay, makes it bearable: I am patient as I pry tape off wrapping paper and fold it into a neat square before turning to the gift inside. I am patient every year at Christmas, when I make a cake that takes three hours from start to finish. But it is something else to be waiting, to stand by and hope, sometimes blindly, for an unknown factor to become known.
Hello from physical therapy this week! Don’t be fooled: it hurt.
Unknown factors fall like strange litter around me these days. Whether I can get through the day without collapsing in pain; blood test results hang somewhere in the ether. The waiting has eaten into my patience, so that even knowing when something is coming — like a long-planned trip, just a few days from now — throws me into restlessness. Nothing feels soon enough.
This is what I told my father on the phone the other night. “When you get there, this will feel like the shortest part,” he reassured me. “It’s the waiting that makes it go on forever. It’s the part that is out of your control.”
Funny, him using that word. Control is something that comes up a lot in therapy, when I talk about the waiting. “I’ve noticed something, that you need the why,” said my therapist recently. “You need a reason. Maybe it helps you feel in control.” She isn’t wrong. I don’t do well with change, because it makes me feel unanchored, like I’ve lost grip on my own reality. My anxiety disorder makes me imagine a hundred and one variations of the same scenario, of the same decision, so that I can feel prepared.
I saw shadows of that threading through Chloe Benjamin’s The Immortalists when I read it not long ago, and it has not left me since. The premise: on New York’s Lower East Side in 1969, the Gold siblings go to a fortune teller rumored to know the exact day a person will die — and, predictably, none of them emerge from her predictions untouched. Over the course of several decades, the Golds live out their respective stories, and the prophecies they carry are never far behind. Whether each of them would have made the same choices before that day in the fortune-teller’s apartment, whether those choices gave them or stole their power over their own lives — these things are as vague as February fog.
It’s the kind of book I love to read, a delicate tightrope walk between reality and the shimmering unknown. When I was younger, I loved the idea that something out of the ordinary, not quite human, was as close at hand as the next street corner. I wondered, reading Immortalists, what I would’ve done, what kind of life I would live if I had a solid end date imprinted in my head. But I know myself too well to want this particular fiction to turn real. My therapist is right: I would want the why, the reason my date was what it was. Short of that, I would go crazy trying to trace my way there, trying to solve for X in that particular equation. There is too much I’m waiting for already, too much I don’t know. And at some point you have to ask: what else is there, when there is so much left to the unknown?
Another known: sunsets, even city ones, are a balm to the soul.
Well. All that’s left, really, are the known factors.
Known: a long hot bath in candlelight soothes both my battered body and my overwrought nerves.
Known: Books are the best kind of escapism.
Known: I am going to be in pain more days than not.
None of this cancels out the waiting. Sometimes it is downright agonizing; sometimes the days on the calendar seem to move so slowly they are going backwards.
But I am doing everything I can — keeping every appointment, doing every exercise, seizing every possible hour of sleep.
I don’t know how long the waiting will last. All it takes is knowing how to make it a little more bearable.