Member-only story
Writer’s note: It’s been one year since we entered lockdown. I wrote this a few months into quarantine but never got around to publishing it. As we’re all reflecting on the year gone by, I thought I’d publish this for posterity. Things have changed so much since then, and not at all.
It’s 7:30 in the morning. Usually, your world by now is a whirl of diapers and milk and laughing-crying-hiccupping-eating-rolling-stomping children. But for whatever reason, the universe is merciful today, and they’re both still asleep.
You recall a friend once describing how she designed a sunroom in her house where she could take her morning coffee every morning to watch the sun rise. You’ve carried this image with you, an Instagram-worthy fantasy of a tall, sleek woman, elegant in a bathrobe, sipping calmly on a home brewed latte that sticks on her upper lip but somehow only makes her more attractive as she breathes in deeply, looking every bit the yoga goddess, and centers herself for her day. You’ve been trying and failing to imitate the practice on your various patios for ten years.
“My God,” you think as you eye the yard shyly. “I’m free.”
Still, your first instinct is to go “doing chores without a child hanging from my hip/leg/toe-that-was-voted-most-protruding-in-high-school” crazy and steam power your efficiency machine through your morning tasks. You take out the trash (no one spits up on you!). You eat breakfast (no one throws a waffle at your head!). You make breakfast for the kids (still, no one throws a waffle at your head! This feels weird. Should you throw a waffle at your own head? No, that would be ridiculous. You’ll wait until the kids are up so they can throw a waffle at your head for you.), all while the sweat from your early morning workout evaporates into the stove range hood.
Then, suddenly, you find yourself without anything to do. The feeling, this “freedom” thing, shifts, pressing in on you in an uncomfortable way. You’re reminded of the Herman Melville quote that hangs on your wall: “There is no steady unrelenting progress in this life. We do not advance through fixed gradations and at the last one pause.”
Yes, but what do you do when, in a life of seemingly unrelenting movement you stumble into caesura?
The world at large in so many ways has paused. The bells in the school on the neighboring hill ring at regular intervals to empty halls. Wild animals wander into ghost towns…
