Story Fifteen

That time I walked a mile.

I’m not sure what other people think of as particularly poignant. It’s one of those things you can kind of divine by the context of movies and music; if Nessun Dorma is playing during every organized crime-related car bombing, you can assume there’s something about the aria that feels explosive. You can assume that Celine Dion (or possibly watery death) is very romantic because they played that song from Titanic for damn near twenty years at school dances. Poignant is harder to narrow down, because it’s so dependent on the self. I didn’t find dryer sheet commercials terribly poignant until the first time I was pregnant, for instance, but once I started crying at the impossible fluffiness of the towels I find I’ve never been able to stop. Fluffy towels in sunlight with folk music somehow remind me of all my failures and it’s both beautiful and sad. I somehow doubt that enough other people have the same reaction to dryer sheets where we could declare them universally poignant.

This is all to say that not too long ago I was in a Walmart and I said fuck it and I bought the last wheelchair-like device that they had. It’s technically called a rollator, but my kids call it my walker and I call it my chair and it’s kind of a hybrid. It cost me a hundred bucks including tax and I love it more than I loved my first truck. I haven’t named it yet — vehicles tell you what to call them when the time is right and this one is still new here. I’ll have to name it something to do with the distance it can travel, or more precisely the distance I can travel with it. It’s wonderfully cheaply made, so it’s already had a wheel fall off in the back of an Uber and it weighs practically nothing but it’ll hold my weight and my gear and suddenly making plans to go out isn’t aspirational anymore.

I don’t still well. Even now, writing this, I’m bouncing both my knees. When I have to appear in long Zoom meetings you can bet I’m knitting off-screen, doing something mindless because sitting still itself requires so much concentration that I tend to lose track of what’s being said so I am always and forever unconsciously fidgeting to the point it distracts others unless I give my body some sort of repetitive movement to release its energy into. I am getting better about it as I age, if for no other reason than I’m more often more frequent pain that requires utter stillness, but I don’t think I count those kinds of still. When it has taken you forty minutes to find the exact angle at which your head doesn’t feel like it might shatter, you don’t find yourself making any kind of unintentional movement - although in that case I have to have a podcast to distract me from the fact that I’m not moving so it doesn’t itch so much to lie quiet.

So I was staying home in accordance with public health advice, but I was also trying to find excuses not to run unavoidable errands because I am getting too old to just sit my happy ass down on a curb every fifty feet when no benches are available, which is often. And even that was making me sick; I had absolutely no idea how fucking old I’d gotten, how I’d lost interest in things that used to be animating to me, how I was just very scared all the time that I would go out and I would find another thing I couldn’t do. Or worse, find something that I probably could do if I would just not be so lazy, not listen to the pain, be my old self that laughed at pain and scoffed at exhaustion even while acknowledging them. And then I got this machine, which I think I might call Violet because I keep thinking it’s purple and actually it’s black.

Suddenly, I am not-trapped and that thought wakes me sometimes and rushes in my bloodstream and tells me that it’s okay, I can just go if I need to. If I want to. I am free to live not quite like I always have liked best, because one does age and change and life opens windows and closes doors and who even wants to go to a club until 4am these days anyway, but in the way I like best now. There is a particular trail in my town, a paved biking and walking path that runs for ten or fifteen miles, and I have been to the trailhead dozens of times and walked as far as I possibly could before having to turn back and I always thought I did pretty well given that I was just starting to get out there again. Reader, I was not doing well. I, the woman who used to wander ten miles in the Chicago downpours or desert heat, could get half a mile in an hour, on a good day. You don’t realize how small your world has become until you can find a way to escape its confines, nor the weight of grief until it lifts.

The first time I saw a tear gas canister explode, The Empire Strikes First by Bad Religion dropped the beat. There are lots of perfectly good songs to play during tear gas, and intellectually I can understand that, but none except that one will ever feel right to me. My brain is overly specific about the emotional shading; wandering through the streets of Chicago sounds different between day and night, rain or snow, clear or cloudy, and again nothing the same as London or Sydney or DC. The music doesn’t often change once it’s been established, because the music is how I remember things. There were so many songs I couldn’t let myself listen to, so many memories of things that I’d thought I couldn’t have anymore that I’d tucked away until I needed them someday.

One of the things that was so full of grief was the loss of all those songs. But now I can move and make new soundtracks and I find that the taste of freedom is something wild and joyful and delicate and harmonious and what it sounds like hasn’t come to me yet, but I know I can go find it.