She awakes to the banging of pots and pans on a gray Tuesday morning. Reluctant to open her eyes to the harsh light that confirms a dreamless night gone and yesterday beginning again, she lies still. The crisp morning air sends spikes down her exposed leg, the old orange cat kneads at her feet, and her mother downstairs has moved from pots to dishes, but still, she lies cold in her bed, her eyes squeezed stubbornly closed, refusing to accept another day in solitude.
It has been eight weeks since the city issued the shelter-in-place mandate. Six weeks more than they had said it would last. The news tells terrible tales of corpses in the streets, children on ventilators, a daughter watching her mother die through a glass wall at the hospital. TV screens flash graphs with foreboding upward arrows, showing increases in cases and deaths. The neighbors have stopped saying hello to each other in crossing. Everything around her smells of danger, tastes of fear.
She left school in the early spring and came back to the pink childhood room that she had departed from only nine months before, holding a vision of the next four years secure in her luggage. How naive she had been to the possibility of this vision changing, to the chance that her life could be completely turned around, terrorized and dampened. Her friends had said then “see you soon,” but when school cancelled for the semester, their words became ironic. “At least we’ll be back together in the fall,” they said, foolishly. By the time school cancelled for the fall semester, they didn’t say anything at all. The much anticipated reunion became an ever more distant hope, a speck in the inauspicious future. All phones fell quiet.
The past eight weeks felt like a silent film set on replay. Late-wake ups led to food-induced naps, which melded into tired movie nights and early bedtimes. Online classes had come and gone quickly, leaving little excitement nor learning in its wake. Her view of her limited surroundings seemed tinted an ice blue; the warm summer air felt unexpectedly frigid. During the many long hours she spent alone in her room, watching a parade of clouds go by through the window, she longed for someone, other than her mother or father or the orange cat, to whom she could speak honestly. Someone to reach for her and grab her hand and whisper that they feel the same way. That she is not, in fact, utterly alone.
This particular Tuesday morning was no different from the day before, or the day before that. She would wipe the crust from her eyes, adjust to the harsh light, and stumble sleepily towards the bathroom. Walk grudgingly down the stairs, say a quick hello to mom, collapse on the couch in front of the TV. Hours later, retreat to childhood room, scroll through phone. Maybe, once in a while, she’d pick up a book and read until the sun gloomed a deep orange. Or maybe she’d just get high. It didn’t really matter what she did, as long as it occupied the time.
She often felt prisoner to this mundane, listless cycle of existence. Some afternoons, she sat by her window and cried, not knowing why. Anything to feel something, she supposed. But sometimes she felt too much, and she couldn’t decide which was worse. Scrambled thoughts and anxieties about coronavirus, the economy, and race riots overwhelmed her brain, and she willed it still. But present anxieties were always replaced by new ones. She was trapped in her home, confined by her mind, with nobody to scream to for help.
There was one time of day, however, during which she felt free. Right before dusk, when the purple and pink-streaked sky falls dim amongst the brightening stars and the crickets begin their nightly ballad, the rising moon can be seen from the top of the small peach tree at the end of her yard. Occasionally, she pulls on a hoodie, covering last night’s pajamas, and walks briskly across the illuminated lawn. The grass below her feet is covered with light green leaves and fallen fruit. Nature’s tapestry, as her father says.
On this Tuesday, a day she had lived but could not remember doing so, she makes it to the peach tree, a thin, sturdy figure on a small mound that had gifted her family generously over the years. Putting one foot on the trunk while grabbing onto the fragile branches, she lifts herself from the ground. Although only a few feet above the soil, she’s able to peer over the gate of the house, past the small creek running in the front, towards the ball of yellow light surfacing behind the distant hills. Mesmerized, she watches it rise, and with it, herself, leaving the tree and her yard and her life behind. She floats closer to the lunar object and can begin to feel its heat, its radiant comfort. It embraces her and envelops her in its warmth. Moon pouring through body, her anxieties fall from her like heavy rain. She stays like this for a while, empty but not alone.
When she finally turns away from the moon and comes back to the tree, her feet planted firmly on the bark, she is lighter. An electric energy, serotonin, she has been told, floods through her body. She stands up straighter. When she looks up the yard, back to her house, her gaze lacks that ice blue tint to which she had become so accustomed. She feels happy, she thinks, surprised. Life seems more beautiful; solitude, more bearable.
She knows how to make herself happy, but intentionally forgets. She is used to the melancholy of her life, and sometimes even finds pleasure in her grief. Gloom has become her daily routine, her one job and purpose, and it is oddly comfortable. Happiness does not belong in a pandemic, she thinks. To be happy is to be guilty. But, elevated by the tree and the crickets and the moon and the stars, she vows to never return to such self-inflicted misery. It’s simply too heavy. She is tired of being miserable.
She had made the same vow every time that she visited the tree over the last eight weeks. But every time, when she returned to her house and sat down for dinner with her mother and father for the umpteenth night, she had trouble remembering her promise. The melancholy engulfed her quickly and silently, and she reentered the cycle. She wouldn’t go outside for days, but basked in her gloom instead.
Her body draped over the peach tree, she thinks about her tendency to linger in her sadness. She is often overly aware of this habit, and knows that she has the ability to alleviate her suffering, if she would only make an effort to do the things that she knows makes her happy. Solitude does not, in fact, require misery. On this Tuesday night, beneath a spider web of stars, she admits aloud that she could be doing more to help herself. That she can’t rely solely on others for happiness, but could create it for herself. She would find it through simpler means: the creek to which she had not been in years, the hilltops that shed carpets of dandelions, and, of course, the moon and the tree. Nature would be her escape. All she had to do was walk outside, beyond the walls of her confinement.
Later, she lies in bed, still, as she had done that morning. Yet, she no longer dreads the coming morning’s bright light that would inevitably follow a passive sleep. Rather, the light that creeps through her window at sunrise is nature’s rooster call, beckoning her outdoors and into its comforting arms. It signals the possibility of a happy day. The next morning, she would open her eyes willingly to the pot banging, hurry cheerfully down the stairs, give her mother a hug, and step outside. The cycle of solitude would be broken.
In a quiet, nervous time, she had sunk into herself, with nobody to throw her a life line. Nature would be her preserver.
By Sarah Flynn.
