The years of diversions

People in Riyadh have driven around the metro works for years. Barriers that move a lane to the left one month and back to the right the next. Concrete columns along the middle of roads that used to be open. A joke, repeated at family dinners, that it will never actually open.

The joke is understandable. When something takes this long, the waiting starts to feel like the permanent state of things. The barriers stop looking temporary and start looking like the city.

But a long time is a measurement, not a verdict. Slow and never are different answers, and from inside the wait they are very easy to confuse.

Here is what usually happens. One day the trains run. Within a month people are complaining about the timetable instead of the diversions. Within a year, a child who rides it to school has no idea there was ever a time without it. The years of detours vanish from memory almost completely, replaced by the thing they were for.

The same is true of slower, smaller projects. Learning a language at an age when it feels too late. Building a small business that has not yet found the people it is for. Writing something that nobody has read yet. Each of them, in the middle, feels like it will always be the middle.

On any given day we see only how far things have got, and we keep reading it as how far they will ever get.

The wait is real, and it is tiring. It is just not the same thing as never.