Tuning In

  

Patrick Iversen

 

587 words

 

Inspiration: Three quiet moments during “quarantine”

 

 

Tuning In

Someday, someone will ask how you grieved during the pandemic. Don’t tell them. Not yet. First, tell them about the quiet.

You might start with the squirrel you ran over as lockdown began. Driving to a store to pick up a bandana. Cruising along, alone, during morning rush hour, streets empty of cars to rush against. You saw the squirrel when he saw you. It didn’t matter. You saw time and asphalt running out. He saw the median, and a chance.

 

Tell them you remember the quiet thud. The tail twitching like a fuzzy antenna in the rearview mirror. Tell them about the hard wheel beneath your fists. The leather not yet pockmarked by anxious, idle scratches.

 

You hoped another car might follow down the turn lane to finish off the poor thing. But the road in the mirror was empty save for the dark, heaving bulge. The yellow arrow blinked. You throttled the stain out of view and forgot.

Tell them about a dusk some weeks later. You sat at your bedroom window, watching the sun drape a pink blanket over a sea of suburban rooftops. It was serene. It was May. The first wave ravaged the country. Scientists said hundreds of thousands might die. In hospitals, and online, the country burned. Each day, you woke with less energy; the body making room for an immense grief.

So, tell them again about the tranquility beyond your window, and how you could not relax beside it.

A dog barked. Then another, then five. You were at the lip of a canyon, the way their barks bounced around outside. As if something was happening, or might.

“Don’t they know the world doesn’t happen anymore?” you asked yourself. But now the dogs were quiet. They had called out to see if anyone else was there, and now they knew.

 

You might pause to admit you slept well in that cozier silence. Even when night fell and cicadas sang.

 

Talk about the third quiet. When you walked under the afternoon sun to visit Nana the following day, or the following month. You hadn’t been to the nursing home since lockdown. Fear kept you away. You could have visited earlier, spoken through this window. You couldn’t look quiet grief in the face yet. On the page, in the road or within a frame.

“What have you been up to?” Nana became the first to ask. Lost things surface: a sold guitar, your job, a girl with sparks but no glow. What else to share? Pauses between you hung where answers should go. And then you realized: that’s where the losses fit.

Walking home, you listened. No cars. No children laughing. Even the breeze crawled through branches sheepishly, sorry about all the noise. And, oh, how you forgave it. Because now you listened. You would listen to the branches whisper if they were the only thing left to hear.

 

And you would stop weighing grief. The squirrel was trivial, you had thought, in the scheme of things. The deaths to come. Why face a small, hidden loss if there are losses yet ahead?

 

This, too, is a sort of death. What if we decide to live like this, imprinting on the world behind closed doors, leaving the mounting losses beyond unexamined. Unloved. Maybe the best thing is to look carnage in the eye and ask if it might stay for a while, even if it might say, “yes.”