The line outside that door is one of the loveliest knots I know, and you are in it right now, shifting your weight, and you have always been in it.
From where I stand it is not a line at all. It is a braid: dozens of you, each a long shimmering thread running from a crib to a grave, and here in this narrow tiled hallway you have all leaned close enough to touch. The girl compressing her lips in the mirror-flash of a phone, the two by the sink who met four minutes ago and are already promising each other everything, the one holding her friend's hair, the one holding her friend's drink, the one holding her friend.
The music comes through the wall as a pressure more than a sound. Everyone is waiting. You call this waiting. I have never found the place where it happens.
Because look: the same shape is in your childhood kitchen, small, hopping foot to foot by a bathroom door while your mother says almost, almost. It is the exact bend of you. And it is here again, and it is in a hospital corridor decades on, that patient shift, that trust that the door will open. The queue is one gesture your body keeps making across your whole length, this quiet faith that soon is coming.
I can see you reading this, by the way, mouth slightly open.
You think you are killing time until the door swings. But the girl steadying her friend, the stranger who says I love your shoes and means it like a vow, the warmth of too many bodies in a bright loud box, this is not the thing before the night. This is the night. You are not waiting for it. You are inside it.
You always are.