This morning, a queue formed without a counter, without a sign, with no promise beyond existing.
This very article, fully aware of its absurdity, takes its place there in the third paragraph.
At dawn, in front of the closed corner convenience store, a queue sprouted like a rumor: first one person, then two, then a human ribbon that ripples around the trees and makes as if to turn at the next paragraph. No counter awaits it, no rope hems in its desire, and yet each person steps forward with a solemn pace toward nothing, accompanied by this text which, too, holds its place and pretends to have an end.
“It’s the most beautiful wait of my life: it promises me nothing, so it doesn’t lie to me,” says Léonie M., who came “to see” and stayed “to stay,” while a neighbor is timing the futile with contagious seriousness. Others nod the way one greets an invisible train: “You feel together in something empty; it’s restful,” murmurs a passerby who found himself patient by the third sigh.
Here, normally, an expert would explain the phenomenon to us. Failing that, the queue explains itself: 87% of those surveyed (by their own gazes) say they don’t know why they’re waiting, but are keen to ignore it together. The writer, well acquainted with the gravity of quotation marks and the lightness of numbers, confirms to you that he is writing straight into the blur and smiling at you from the other side of the margin.
At sunset, nothing has begun and everything has lasted. The shops across the street sell bottles of water and jokes, the ground remembers the footsteps the way one keeps the crease of an unread book, and the queue, polite, shifts aside when strollers pass. This piece, too well-mannered to cut in front of anyone, lets you go here; if you choose to stay, know that that’s exactly what the ending that follows does: it waits.
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