The Line

Nobody likes waiting in line. Whether it’s being stuck in traffic on your way home from work or picking the wrong cashier at the grocery store, waiting in line is almost instinctively associated with monotony and frustration. For me though, it was my favorite form of entertainment – an opportunity to suspend myself in a comforting, manufactured setting. As a kid, I invented a game called “line-up”; the compelling activity involved gathering every random small toy I could find, and – instead of playing with them – simply lining them up. That was the game. Hours of entertainment, consumed in simply inching up the snaking trail of figurines one by one, only to shorten the line by maybe a foot in a single sitting. Sometimes my toys would be queuing to a much-coveted Fisher Price dollhouse, and sometimes it was an upturned laundry basket I called “the castle”. Yet, it wasn’t the destination that mattered. No, it was the line itself that I relished; where everyone else saw the epitome of boredom, I found pleasure.

For me, line-up represented an interlude of suspended time, a moment in which I could indulge in the comforting sense of order and balance that I wished for in my own life. Subconsciously – though I never realized it at the time – I was in some ways jealous of the little plastic figurines that populated my epic line. Their lives were simple; they had a clear destination ahead of them, and all they had to do was follow the head in front of them to reach it. To me, the mocking, never-fading smiles pasted on their plastic faces conveyed the happy, ordered lives in which they lived. I was only six years old, and I wasn’t jealous of my toys. I was jealous of the world I had constructed for them.

However, as my family grew, so did the distractions and interruptions of my game. Every so often, a younger sibling would enter the scene, and my beautiful line would be scattered in a tornado of toddler passion. The constructed, ordered world I had worked so meticulously to construct would then be surrendered to utter entropy. However, I eventually devised what I considered an effective solution: I stuck my sister in an empty Amazon box and placed her in the corner. Thus, I preserved my line by containing the encroaching chaos of the outside world and shoving it out of my mind. Despite denying myself the pleasure of an added playmate, I found solace in the fact that my constructed world was at least kept intact.

As I got older, I aged out of my toys but I continued to put boxes around my problems (though thankfully, no longer literally). However, I eventually began to encounter obstacles that were beyond the realm of even my control. In the middle of third grade, the entire safe and orderly world around me was completely uprooted as my family and I moved to England. Even I couldn’t find a way to put a box around that one. The predestined path I had constructed for myself – the illusory veil of control I had for so long draped over my world – fell suddenly to the ground in chaos. As I faced the uncertain prospect of a new world three thousand miles away, I found myself staring my own vulnerability in the face, and I hated it.

It took a few years – of stumbling in the dark, blindly trying to pick up the pieces of my world and put them back in line – before I realized the futility of it all. After moving houses three more times, it seemed that having control over my life was not only impossible, but extremely limiting. Constructing order out of the chaos around me was like reducing life and all its complexity to something cold and artificial, streamlining a dynamic natural world into a narrow 2D course.

Ultimately, being knocked out of line was the best thing that ever happened to me. I had lived for so long only seeing the value in the things I could control, that I failed to recognize all the beauty and possibilities that lay just outside those confines – only accessible should I have the courage to venture out of line. Had I succeeded in following the predetermined course I set for myself, there would have been a lot less turbulence – fewer twists and turns in my journey – but I would have marched right past all the things that have molded me into the person I am today. I learned that order is artificial; if my life was to be in order, then I’d be living a lie, something manufactured rather than real, and I was determined to own my own truth. Even though I no longer know where my final destination lies – whether I’m destined for a shiny house or an upturned laundry basket – I do know that I am not waiting in line to get there.