Wait It Out

Dear Judith,

I recently purchased Imogen Heap's new CD, entitled Ellipse. My current favorite song from the album is "Wait It Out".

Everyday, I think of what might have been, if I had stayed for a second year, if I had extended my contract. I feel like I lost myself on the trip back to America. Perhaps the real me never left the airport in Saipan. Sometimes I feel like I'll never reconcile who I was there with who I am here. I wonder if I'll ever recover from the loss of my Saipan home, family, and life. How can I speed up the process? In fact, I may want to hold on to the pain of goodbyes, because at least that part of Saipan is still real in America.

As I try to endure my feelings of desperation for Saipan, it helps to know that others can put my feelings to music in a way that is much more comforting than I anything I could ever conjure. Here are the lyrics:

Where do we go from here?
How do we carry on?
I can't get beyond these questions...

Clambering for the scraps in the shatter of us collapsed
that cuts me with every could-have-been

Pain on pain on play repeating
with the backup, makeshift life in waiting

Everybody says time heals everything
but what of the wretched hollow?
The endless in between
are we just going to wait it out?

There's nothing to see here now,
turning the sign around
We're closed to the earth 'til further notice

A stumbling cliched case,
crumpled and puffy faced
Dead in the stare of a thousand miles

All I want, only one, street level miracle
I'll be an out and out, born again, from none more
cynical

And sit here cold, we will be long gone by then
In lackluster, in dust we layer on old magazines,
fluorescent lighting sets the scene
in the one life that we've got

And sit here
Just going to wait it out
And sit here cold
Just going to sweat it out
Wait it out