We were waiting for Socrates on a street corner. Derek had gotten the call a few minutes ago and we knew he would be here soon. We huddled together. It wasn’t that cold, but we needed to huddle together. Socrates was coming, and maybe we were scared, or maybe we were excited. We huddled together. The roads were wet. The wind was slow and carried a faint odor of storm drains.

We checked our watches to see how long it had been. We all wore watches, back then. I think mine is lost now. Maybe I dropped it in a gutter somewhere. I don’t remember. Jake still wears his on some days, but it doesn’t run anymore. You can get your ear as close to it as you want and you won’t hear anything, unless you shake it. It can still rattle, at least. Like one of those toys for infants to help them fall asleep.

The light would turn red and the cars would stop at the intersection, and we would look into the windows for familiar faces. All we saw were framed pictures of men and women, and they looked like ghosts through the fog on the windows. They would sometimes look back, but we would all turn away and look at the ground or the sky or the restaurant windows across the street. Then the light would turn green and they would speed off, splashing brown water on our shoes. All we could do was shake the spare droplets off and remain standing.

“We’ve been here a while,” said Jake. “A long time.”

“We’re still here,” said Derek.

“We may be here a while,” I said.

Jake was staring off into the gloom of the street. Jake thought a lot. We all thought a lot. Jake just liked to remember, most of the time. And I can’t blame him. There wasn’t always a lot to look forward to. But I looked forward a lot of the time anyway. And I thought about Socrates. A shiver went down my spine when I mouthed his name into the darkness. I didn’t expect him to be a great man. I expected him to be a spyglass, though which we might see something beyond ourselves, or of ourselves.

Derek was tapping his foot and slapping his palms against his thighs. Maybe he had found a rhythm somewhere in the white noise of the city. I listened, but all I heard was the buzzing. He was making something up. I thought about explaining the temporal elements of rhythm to him, how music was only beautiful because it existed in the moment, because it would fade and die. But now was not the time. Derek wasn’t like me. He was here, constantly, even when he didn’t want to be. I was too but my thoughts were usually somewhere else, and so was Jake but he always seemed one step ahead of his memories, like they were holding him back, but he wanted them to. I know that now. We had chosen who we were, the blame and the pride was ours to have, to play with, to dance to. We stood on the street corner, and I began to silently hope something of myself would be left by the time Socrates arrived, so that I would still have somewhere to search for answers, and a vantage point to search from.

We had built ourselves up into machines we didn’t fully understand. Input and output, and by the scientific method we were still attempting to discover what was in between. But if every input changes the mechanism it slips through, how can we ever hope to guess an output? Each time we searched we added new gears and passageways. I stopped myself. My head was beginning to feel like a vacuum tube again. I let it rest and fill itself up with shadows and car headlights. I felt it brimming and foaming over again, already. Fuel for thought. I could only take in so much before I had switch on again and process it.

“How long ago did he call?” asked Jake.

“I don’t know,” said Derek.

I laughed. It was forced, and I hated the feeling of forcing a laugh. The feeble noise bounced off the buildings and spread itself thin, and then was gone.

“He’ll be here,” I said, trying to smile. “He’s coming, I can feel it.”

“We may have missed him,” said Jake. He stifled a cough, and watched water glisten in the cracks of the brick sidewalk.

“Have faith,” I said, having none myself. “If we missed him than he’ll come again.”

I started to whistle. I couldn’t remember the song, only the melody. I had woken up with the melody playing in my head and it hadn’t gone away. I waited for it to cycle back to the beginning in my head before I began whistling to it. I couldn’t well interrupt it, or start it out of time with my waking. Surely my mind hadn’t missed a beat since I had acquired the melody in a distant dream world. Surely the tempo was still true to when I had slipped out of bed and back into the world of the dying.

It was a world full of life, because everyone was dying. Even Jake was dying, even Derek, even me. We had all accepted that a long time ago. As to if a concept can be accepted before it is fully realized, I have never been in a position to offer more than speculation. But Socrates, he would know. Or at least, he would know how to strain the knowledge from us, how to trap the pulp and let the pure water escape. We would all know who we had become, when Socrates arrived. Derek would know why he tapped his shoes against the bricks, and Jake would know why he gazed with such longing upon all that was behind, and I would know why I kept my eyes trained on a light I could never reach.

As we stood on the street corner, all of us could feel the tides of despair and hope, of doubt and belief, moving in and out. They submerged us for just long enough to leave us gasping for air as we escaped, and allowed us only the amount of oxygen needed to keep us alive under the next wave. This was living, and we had to keep breathing, and keep holding our breath, and remember when to do one and when not to do the other, and as long as we could do that we could live. But living was not only a matter of survival. It was a matter of fully recognizing the will to exist. We had all done it in different ways, that may be true. But we had all done it. And every moment was that test, and that question, and that answer.

The test now was to wait, and so we huddled together and we waited, together. Time and cars and water slipped by. Every element was crossing over others, crossing over itself, on the three dimensional plane. But as always, like the pain of losing a dream to the fog of awakening, like an aching somewhere between the roof of the mouth and the floor of the skull, we felt the impossible: a fourth dimension, in which everything was moving in the same direction. The waiting was painful. But the waiting was the process which united three disheveled individuals. We were across from one another, or close, or far away, or thinking of things close or of things far away, or struggling with the inside against the outside, or falling, or rising. But no matter the placement of our bodies or minds or souls all three of all three were moving, through the medium which defies all attempts at expression, in one singular direction.

We were lonely in every place, but never in any time.

And without time, we would be stopped, we would have stopped, and we would stand still, not only stopped forever but stopping forever, caught in the action of a lack of action, imprisoned by a solid state of doing. Not being, but doing. One cannot be without motion. And though we stood still that night, listening to the world collapse around that one little street corner, we were waiting, and as long as we were waiting the hope was alive, and as long as we hoped we moved, together, forward and outward and inward, always together in the singular purpose of the now, which was to become that which was not the now.

The ghosts of friction would assault us forever, from the past, from the future, from the present. But still the now will continuously become that which is not the now, and the world will flow, and the past will be made beautiful by its rust, the present beautiful by its intangibility, and the future beautiful by its promise.

We were waiting for Socrates on a street corner. And then one by one we turned around: Jake, then Derek, then me. He had been sitting behind us, looking on through the window of a coffee shop, sipping on hemlock, smiling to himself. We smiled back, and the image of his tired old face blurred as our eyes focused instead on our reflections in the glass, and we laughed like children.