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Emily Dickinson, "If you were coming in the Fall," c. 1862
A woman in Amherst, Massachusetts, wrote a poem in her bedroom around 1862 and sewed it into a little booklet with thread. She did not publish it.
It was found after she died, among nearly eighteen hundred other poems.
She was waiting for someone. We do not know who.
Scholars have argued about it for more than a century, and there is still no certain answer. It does not matter.
What matters is what she wrote.
She sat down and made a list. If the wait were months, she could manage.
If centuries, she would count them on her hand. If it lasted past her own death, she would throw this life away like a rind of fruit and take whatever came next.
Then the list broke.
“But, now, uncertain of the length
Of this, that is between,
It goads me, like the Goblin Bee”
I need you to read this again.
She can bear anything with a deadline. Months. Years. Her own death.
She is not asking for it to be easy. She is asking for it to be certain.
And it is not certain.
That is the sting. Not the length of the wait, but the not knowing whether the wait has a point at all.
We are told every day that feeling has a shelf life. That if it did not happen by a certain age it is not going to.
In the fourth stanza, she said she would toss her entire life away like a fruit rind if she knew what was on the other side. No hesitation. No hope. Just: I would take Eternity.
That is not timid. That is not careful.
And then these three lines take it all back. She does not even have a word for the space she is living in. It is just "this." The unnamed stretch between now and whatever comes.
I know that stretch. You do too.
You are not waiting because you are foolish. You are waiting because you know something. The knowing came first. The proof has not caught up yet.
Nobody gave her a date. Nobody gave her a guarantee. She got a Goblin Bee and a sting she could not even locate.
And she still addressed the poem to "you." Not to God. Not to the future. To a person whose face she knew.
She said: if I knew you were coming, I could do any of this.
She never sent the poem. Copy it anyway.
Underneath it I wrote
I stopped asking when. That was never the real question.
Today. Copy these three lines by hand. Underneath, write the name of the thing you are waiting for. Not what you want to happen. The thing itself.
What I wrote that year
In March of the year I could not write, I copied a sentence of Tolstoy's about a man crossing a field at dawn. Underneath it I put three words. "Still the field." I think the pen was just making sure the page still took ink. I kept looking at those words afterward, as if they might tell me what came next.
