Waiting All My Life

Written by Rachel

June 21, 2004

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters in ER, wish I did but that's not reality. The song is performed by Rascal Flatts. A group that is wonderful check them out.

A/N: This is my rendition of how the letter to Abby should have been. I know it's been a while since Dear Abby has aired, but I never was happy with the letter that Carter wrote to her, written for Carter's point of view.

I sat with my headphones playing in my ears as I tried to find the words to write to her, to let her know in my own way that I wasn't going to come back and that I didn't want her to feel that she needed to wait for me. Things were not the way that I wanted them and I did not know if they would ever be that way again.

Everybody needs it
everybody wants it

I thought that I was the exception to that rule. I didn't need it, I didn't want it. I had it but I had managed to find a way to loose it more than once. Relationship after relationship seemed to fail there was nothing that I could do that ever seemed to make it go right.

Everybody's searching for someone
been down a thousand highways

I had to ask myself if I really was searching for someone, the places I had been, the people I had met, nothing seemed to make it any easier. Most of the people I had dated now worked at the same place I had. Except for the woman who was holding my heart now, I had strayed a long ways from home, lost looking for something but never knew just what that something was.

I never thought would end
Baby, I've been
Waiting all my life to find you
Always been one step behind you
your love babe
I've been waiting all my life

I thought that this what I had been waiting for all my life, but now it seemed like nothing more than a shattered illusion of what I should have been, more of what I could have been. I had always been one step behind her, a moment to late. How can you love one person with all your heart and yet knowing that you had someone's love turn your back to it when it was what you knew that you wanted, new what you needed, was everything that your heart could ever desire.

I was tired of waiting
every night was praying
Everyday would be the day I'd find you

I was so tired of waiting for the time to be right, praying for something that would never come. Or so I thought it would never come. How could life be so cruel that it could put it there right before your eyes but not allow you to see the best thing that could ever happen to you. Someone had to be playing with my mind, messing with my heart, either that or the karma gods really just hated me.

I grew so impatient, how long would it take
to know you were out there somewhere,
somewhere waiting, wondering just like me

I know that you were just as lost as I was. Looking for something that we thought that we both needed but yet the baggage was just too great for either of us to move forward with each other, need to go out separate ways. Hurting each other seemed to be what we did best rather than loving each other. You were waiting for me, you were wondering the same things that I was. We could read each like we were open books, a romance novel that once you started you never could put it down until you reached the end, but for us the end was not story book.

I've been waiting all my life to love you
All that time I was dreaming of you
Your love babe
I've been waiting all my life

I hear those words and I know that it was you I was dreaming of, but once I was awake the dream seemed to end every time. It always ended the same way. Me leaving you walking away before I could break what was left of us into something that we couldn't never repair, not that we could have repaired what had gone wrong up until that point in time. No, it was to far gone, to in need of repair, like the car that needed it's oil changed but you needed to drive that extra 1000 miles.

And did I lose faith, did I lose heart
Maybe I did, but I never lost my way
To where you are - I've been

I lost my faith a long time ago, faith in you, faith in me, and faith in us. That was my downfall not yours. I lost my heart somewhere along the way and I have yet to find it. I have done so many things wrong that I don't know how to make right anymore. It's not that I don't want to, I have never lost my way to you, I have always known where you are but I lost my way in life. There's a difference I didn't feel like I belonged anywhere anymore. That I was not needed, was not wanted.

Waiting all my life to find you
always been one step behind you
your love babe
I've been waiting all my life

It's hard to admit when you are wrong and even harder to admit that you're the one that screwed up something. That you are the reason that you don't have the one thing that you have been waiting for; you are the one that threw away the one thing just one step out of your reach, the one thing being your love the most precious gift that a person can be given.

I've been waiting all my life to love you
All that time I was dreaming of you
Your love babe
I've been waiting all my life

I guess that I will always be waiting for the rest of my life for the right person. I hope that there is more than one perfect person out there for everyone. That I can find the one love that is as perfect as the one that I threw away without a second thought. The one love that is like the love that you gave to me and your love is the only love that can make me feel the only way that you can.

Your love I've been waiting
Your love I've been waiting all my life
All my life, all my life

All my life that seems like forever now and it will always be that way until I can find the way to make this right between us. Maybe I was meant to wander around this world alone searching, wandering, lost with out my other half, the completion of my soul. It just seems that whenever I get close enough to love somebody like you, they fall right thru my fingers. I will wait the rest of my life to love you again, for there is no one like you, not now, not ever. But I don't want you to end up waiting all your life for me, that wouldn't be fair, since I don't know if I will ever be the man that you deserve the man that you need in your life, a rock, something stable and secure.

I set the pen down reading what I had written I just hoped that she understood what was happening, and while I maybe waiting all my life for her, she shouldn't wait all her life for me.