Vapid Eyes and What Comes Next

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Global Status: 335,403

Active Cases: 223,156

Recovered Cases: 97,636

Fatal Cases: 14,611

Come here, he said. I walked across the deck and he wrapped his arms around me from behind. We were still. The morning was still. No wind. No rain. No hail.

The sounds of the city have been replaced by the singing of the birds. This guy singing this song, that guy singing another. Talking to each other in a language we don’t understand. They wander from this feeder to that one. Totally Unconcerned. This is what it sounded like for most of history and it was a deep, powerful, colorful feeling that slowly wound its way around my soul.

I baked Amish White Bread. It took two-and-a-half hours. We painted our paint-by-numbers for another hour. Aidan trimmed the plum tree. And then the apple. And then the peach. And then the cherry. It took him hours. He threw the ball to the top deck for Sherlock countless times. Sherlock’s tongue grew to four times it’s regular size. Pink and happy and a little frothy at the corners of his gigantic smile. Lovin’ His Papa.

We went for a bike ride on our e-bikes. For the first time in my life, I never once looked behind me. I never once glanced in my rear-view mirror. I never once was afraid of a car coming up behind me. There are no cars now. And I felt a freedom I’ve never felt. We rode on the wrong side of the road. In the middle of the road. Weaving all around the road. We rode up windy-empty-beautiful streets and I looked around me in a way I never once had before. The sage and the little valleys hiding their little birds and their big old jack rabbits. The rocky outcroppings and the way they cut away the hills to make the road so long ago. The green stucco houses that were the wrong color green. The houses set just so, pretending they had a view when they really didn’t. The houses that wished they were on the other side of the street so they could stare at the city with their Vapid Eyes. People hiding behind those windows while their trees out front budded with florescent nubbins.

People were washing their cars in the driveway. Cars they had no intention of driving. People were wearing shorts. Dressed for the weather they want, not the weather they have. We had jackets and gloves, and beanies under our helmets, and my body was the perfect temperature underneath all that as we whipped around here and there.

We rode with no idea where we were going, or where we were, and it didn’t matter a bit. The skies were a color I’ve never seen before. The baby blue on the horizon. The magically crisp lines between the cloud edges and the deep blue behind. Looking into the reaches of space.

There’s no pollution, I say. I’ve never seen anything like it, he says. We stopped in the middle of the street and stared up for a long time. A tear worked its way from the corner of my eye and I wiped it away with my glove. I Should’ve Let It Fall.

We rode home and made some food and fed all the everybodys and watched a movie about some apocalypse or another. An apocalypse that somebody dreamed up before the apocalypse.

We lit some candles.

People can so rapidly adapt to anything.

I don’t want to adapt to What Comes Next.