Waiting . . .

I'm thirteen years old. Someone yells from the front of the school bus. "Hey Mon, how do you keep a moron in suspense?" 
"I don't know! How?" I yell back. I love jokes!
My friend waves me off, apparently engrossed in a new conversation already.
"How?" I yell again.
"Never mind. I'll tell you tomorrow," she hollers back.
"No, tell me now!" I beg. 
And beg.
All the way home.
Like a moron.
Patience is not my strong suit and it can lead to bouts of moronitis. I actually think I may have become a teacher to teach myself patience. I have learned to be more patient in general - and I have endless patience for little people who really need it. But overall,  it is still not a strong suit.
There are gifts with every burden, of course, and the upside of impatience is that if something needs doing, I want to get it done. I am not a procrastinator. I may be a precrastinator. Case in point: It has taken my poor partner 28 years to train me to sit after a meal and not hop up to start the dishes. I still can't tell exactly where the line is between we're sitting around chatting and patting our full tummies and I don't want to look at these dirty dishes anymore. If there are dishes to be done, let's get them done so it's over with. 
Paper to write? Get 'er written! I had a pile of completed term papers in a basket on my desk in university - each with a note to remind me of it's upcoming due date. Jeez, now that I see that in print, I think my friends may be right: that story really does make me look like a loser. 
Anyhow, the point is, I'm not good with waiting. Which is what I am doing at this very moment. 
I wrote earlier about wanting to write the new book with more patience. To wait and to listen and to follow the characters which is not my usual style. Well, I am out of road in the story and instead of constructing more and moving forward, I'm waiting to see if the characters will point me in the right direction.
So I'm sitting and waiting.
Well, technically, I'm writing to you about sitting and waiting. 

I just put the pen down for a while when I noticed a moth on the deck - a big, beautiful moth who wasn't moving. I went and sat closer to it to watch, thinking perhaps it was dead. But then one section of wing moved a little. Oh! Is it asleep? Dying? Meditating? Every few seconds that wing moved a little so I sat vigil and watched. And waited. 
Then a breeze flipped the moth up and over and revealed a little scavenger ant underneath the magestic corpse, licking his nasty little ant lips; this culprit was causing the movement. The moth had been dead the whole time.
So, what's the lesson?
The novel I'm working on  - that I am "watching" - is already dead and I just don't know it? Egads!
Perhaps the lesson is simply that things are not always as they appear.
Or maybe it's that finding the truth requires a much closer look. And some patience.
Okay.
​I'm waiting.​

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