Waiting for the bus in the Canaries is not an action, it is a state of the soul. One does not wait for the bus: one inhabits the wait, settles into it, turns the stop into a small temporary home overlooking a road along which, sooner or later, they say something will pass.
The phone app, that modern oracle, has spent fifteen minutes assuring you the bus arrives “in two minutes.” They are elastic, conceptual minutes, stretching like chewing gum, which no physicist has yet managed to explain. You look at your watch, look at the app, look at the empty horizon, and begin the cycle again with the patience of a monk.
Beside you at the stop, a small community of waiting gradually forms. The lady who has already given up on it. The student with headphones. The man who asks everyone whether it’s already gone, as if someone could have watched it pass and kept quiet about it. Bonds are formed. Sighs are shared. Something resembling solidarity is forged under that shelter.
And when it finally appears, rounding the bend with its gentle-whale gait, we all feign indifference, as if we hadn’t spent half our lives waiting for it. We get on, tap the ticket, sit down and look out of the window. The wait no longer matters. Until tomorrow, of course, when we return to the stop to practise, once again, this art so much our own of waiting.
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