The cool silence of a morning with the blinds pulled shut. Hearing the rain on the windows behind, while Sophie breastfeeds on the couch. The light muffles through the crack beneath the bedroom floor, where Georg is working from home while the Covid-19 cases pile up in Salt Lake. The silence feels deeper knowing that it won't be broken when the sun rises higher, that the streets will stay empty, the business closed, while the people wait in their homes for a pandemic to end.
And then, the shaking.
At first I wonder if it's happening, but now, yes, the whole building is moving, and the floor beneath. Georg blasting open the door to the bedroom and saying, "Bring Sophie!"
"To the door frame?" I mumble, as we run to the door and wait. "The doorframe is for earthquakes?" I ask, my brain not quite working.
"Yeah," he says, and the shaking stops.
"Should we move?" I say.
"Yeah," he says.
And we move. I ask if we can sit next to him on the bed for a bit. "How long have I lived here?" I ask. "Maybe five years? Six? I have never felt anything like that."
Georg's phone starts vibrating, all of his coworkers asking if everyone is okay. He reads their messages to me, "The internet is out, this guy's light fixtures and mirrors fell out, they have to stay out of the apartment for awhile..." But my heartbeat is slowing, so I bring Sophie to the living room where I look up to the light fixtures, seeing everything as a potential threat.
"5.7 magnitude," Georg texts me from the bedroom. "Could be aftershocks."
I look at the couch, where there is nothing that could fall, so I place her on the couch and turn on the TV, letting her watch some nursery rhymes.
Is there anything to make of this?
I go to the kitchen, sliding frozen blueberries into the microwave- Sophie's favorite.
Is there anything to make of this?
Just that the earth roars forth its fragility at times, so that we can be sure we are rooted to something deeper than earth. Rooted in- ?
That formless, depthless place where the mind dips briefly in meditation, a meditation that I will not be missing today during Sophie's nap, or ever again (until life cools back into normalcy, until I forget).
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