Most Saturday nights in Cape Town, I’d call up my friend Philip and we’d drive together to The Waiting Room— easily our favorite Cape Town bar, gritty and dirty and bathed entirely in red light. Like most of Long Street, it’s like a really fun lounge party at a crack house, but with leather chairs and $2 vodka-sodas.  The night usually followed a specific routine: We’d pay cover, stroll in, I’d flirt with the bartenders, get yelled at by the DJ for requesting Kanye West, dance, drink, and then stumble out at 3 a.m. for a boerewore. It was a good life. Along the way, Philip and I had these very long, intense discussions about our creative projects and upcoming plans. The future was coming at us so rapidly, and our whole lives were laid out right in front of us. All we had to do was work, and wait. In the meantime, we had this place.

The waiting room I inhabit now is a little different: no red light bulbs, only fluorescent. Like my old watering hole, there’s a cast of characters: two squashy, fussy elderly ladies who “still pray for Barack Obama (even if he’s running this country into the ground) because the Bible tells us to pray for our governments.” They have advanced breast cancer; they can’t pronounce “Ahmadinejad” when the TV is turned to CNN. There’s the boisterous, plump Croatian lady who is here supporting her ex-boyfriend, whose 6’4” frame was reduced to 110 pounds during a severe bout of Stage 4 lung cancer. There’s my sister and me, with our magazines, with our dad, who knows all the nurses by name and has been here every day for the last two weeks. The three of us give the rest descriptive nicknames: Those Old Republican Women, Cro-At, Slim. Like before, there’s a sense of camaraderie: we are in this nightmare together. Together, we will wait for radiation to be over, wait for hospitalization and transplant, wait and wait and wait until the word loses all meaning and just becomes sound. In the meantime, there is this place.

People keep on asking how the dreaded “transition” is going, how I’m adjusting and acclimating after half a year overseas. “The transition,” always the transition, this dreaded period about which I was warned. Though in some ways it feels like I’ve tumbled out of Alice’s rabbit hole into a world simultaneously recognizable and unfamiliar and parallel, it’s actually okay. I still have hope, I’m still waiting and wishing, still pleading for the future to hurry up and get here. My only request, I suppose, is another vodka-soda.