Waiting Room

When we reached the top of the stairs we were confronted with an image of blue. Blue carpets, blue walls, blue blinds and teamed with the sensation in my stomach, it was like being on a boat at sea. The second thing that struck me was the emptiness and quietness of the room, despite it being located in the centre of town. The receptionist who we had announced our arrival to was also absent. Perhaps she was behind one of the many mysterious doors that were lining the edges of the room? To make the waiting process less dull, an eclectic pile of magazines was carefully stacked on a small table in the middle of the room. I shuffled through one, hoping that it would provide an alternative focus for my mind but I found myself just reading the words as if they had no meaning, they were just patterns on a page. I remember discovering a quiz in the back pages of the magazine called ‘does your man really love you?’ and I half jokingly began to answer the questions. Having found that this new tool distracted my thoughts I was slightly disappointed when I was interrupted by the opening of one of the mysterious doors. An older man came out and paced towards a different door, without acknowledging the existence of me and mum, and shut it firmly behind him. He had left the door of the first room wide open so that I was able to see a small boy sitting nervously in a chair with an abacus on the table. I clearly remember thinking, ‘I hope I don’t have to use an abacus,’ when the older man hurried out of the secret room and abruptly shut the door on the small boy and on my curious eyes.
At this point it had struck me that we must have been waiting for a long time and eventually boredom greeted me. My mother was already deep into one of her engrossing novels and seemed unavailable for conversation. When boredom kicks in the main apparatus you have to entertain yourself is your thoughts and my thoughts turned to the concept of this room. We were in a waiting room. A room which is solely used for people to wait in. Other rooms are for people to keep themselves busy in, such as the kitchen where you cook and eat, or the bedroom where you sleep, or the living room where you absorb yourself in your favourite television programme. But this is the room where you wait. This is the boredom room. Furthermore, waiting rooms never seem to have a positive or exciting outcome. They lead to you having your mouth probed and a filling drilled in to a tooth, or finding out that you have a broken leg or cracked ribs. They lead to you being grilled and humiliated in an interview, or waiting for a train which has inevitably been cancelled. Waiting rooms never have a positive outcome.