Graphic by Raili Bourne
Dear reader,
I see your aimless wandering. I see how your legs move in no particular direction, your beat-up shoes shuffling on the cracked pavement, sluggishly making your way to your dead-end job. Doesn’t it ever feel like you might as well just… stand still? I was once like you. A walker, moving only in accordance with the tides, like a brainless floating jellyfish. Then I asked myself the question: why must I move? Why can’t I just… stop and wait for life instead of rushing to the end? Perhaps with several others waiting ahead of me? When I asked these questions I turned a corner and saw it, the answer to it all: the line.
Millions of people are in the line— it’s the fastest growing religion (don’t look that up) and the best way to cultivate your divine aura in these trying times. I love the line. The line gives me purpose, direction (single-file), a reason to waste my life standing and waiting. The line is community, we all love the line, we’re all in it together, the great Waiting. We love to wait, to wait is to live.
Thus we are carried in a blind manner, the great formal affair is beginning, orchestrated as a stationary ballet where we all dance in synchronicity. Isn’t it beautiful, isn’t it the purest expression of humanity, to participate in waiting, to join a line whose end purpose eludes you? Many people join the line and ask “Yo, what’s this line for?” And we all just chuckle. There is no destination, there is no reward, there is no iPhone 16 with Apple Intelligence or vintage Y2K butterfly pea banana bread matcha at the end. There is no purpose to do it at all aside from the great unity of commiseration. In the line, you can turn to your neighbor and say “Oh my God, this line is so fucking long,” and your neighbor will return the sentiment with a solemn nod and bemused smile. This is community at its highest; in no other religion will the guy next to you hand you an empty two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew at the precise moment you’re about to piss yourself. Nowhere else can you find a soccer mom (who’d long abandoned her van) with an ample supply of Trader Joe’s fruit leathers in her purse to satiate your hunger.
What are you waiting for? I bet you don’t know, but in the line, we all know. We aren’t waiting for anything, we’ve shed our delusions of purpose or higher meaning and have opened ourselves to the breadth of determinism. We are unified in the line, we are waiting for life. Life is waiting, we’re living our life as it’s meant to be lived, in a neat, single-file line that wraps around sixteen full city blocks.
JOIN THE LINE. LOVE THE LINE.
