What's that spec in the distance? A bush? A toddler? No, it's Megan, who was walking with her friends five minutes ago and is now two miles ahead of them. Having already insisted that they leave for their destination--ten minutes away at an amble--twenty-five minutes early, she will arrive just in time to see the train BEFORE their train depart.

Somewhere deep within my genetic make-up, between my obsessive need to be number one and my teeny tiny legs (courtesy of my five-foot-nothing mother), I have been both blessed and cursed with the ability to be at least twenty minutes early to everything. I'm fairly certain the dictionary definition of "overcompensation" is the rate at which these teeny tiny legs leave everyone else in the dust.

I have seen the inside of many a dark classroom.

I have explored the corners of many a foreign airport, having deliberately arrived with four hours until I can even check in for my flight.

I have, on every day but one this semester, arrived so early to my work study job that the door has not yet automatically unlocked.

I spend a lot of time waiting.

I spend a lot of time in public places, with a book propped up in front of me despite my four-second attention span and the really interesting thing that person over there is doing. My people-watching skills are unrivaled and I could not begin to tell you how many poems I have written starring the train station florist, or that guy with the cello on the subway that one time. These are the little luxuries that being early affords me; I get to see how people and places and moments interact with each other, how the world goes on, while I wait to take my little part in it. I get to watch the clock tick off the minutes and rest easy knowing that there is no possible way I can be late now.

Maybe it's an anxiety thing. Maybe it's the result of some punctuality-related trauma in my childhood. Who can say for sure? All I know is that, as I type this, I am waiting in a bus terminal for a bus that doesn't board for another hour and a half. The old lady to my left seems absolutely amazed at how quickly I can type, and the girl on the other end of the phone call with the teenage boy to my right has no idea he has a bouquet of roses on his lap. I won't talk to these people--their bus boards in a few minutes, anyway--but I watched them arrive and I'll watch them leave and later, at some quiet moment, I will wonder how they are. There is a special kind of bond you form while waiting with other people, a kind of in-between space you enter while you both wait for your lives to go on separately.

It's silly, I guess, the poetic side of me trying to make something out of a nothing moment. But it doesn't feel like a nothing moment. When I arrive somewhere, twenty minutes early and out of breath, it really is like a weight lifted off my shoulders. I can stop rushing. I can look around. I can construct my game plan and know, to the second, at what time I will board the bus, or class will start, or the door will finally open. I will know that I am here, I am ready, and there's no way I'm going to walk in late and make a spectacle of myself.

And, in the meantime, I can watch the couple across the room fly into each other's arms, and in my head I can start writing their story.