a beautiful life
what does community and connectedness mean when we are all hiding?
‘I am creating a beautiful life,’ she whispers to herself as she lay in bed unsure if a cold or sadness has struck her for the fifth day in a row. Everyone’s working, no one’s popped in and the silence of the walls are now so deafening that their presence now sing melodies that affix themselves to her heart. Quiet and silence in her obnoxiously big apartment, blur in the whistle of the wind blowing the trees outside her window.
‘I am creating a beautiful life.’ Yet, nobody has come. Her parents miles away in their home that was once her home; siblings having taken ‘flying the nest’ literally and plopped themselves in entirely new countries; friends have their own lives; and what does church community even mean when you no longer show up on Sundays because the fear of having been gone too long now swallows you more than going for your sanity? How does she crawl back to being ‘normal’ when life has uprooted and she’s unsure how to reach for help, she can barely reach for the tissues by her bedside. Why does loving in community feel infinitely scarier than loving one on one? She turns in bed, too sick to play music, too tired to heave herself up to get the remote to turn the tv on, but she can watch the rain with the pigeons keeping her company.
The phone rings.
It’s work checking in. ‘Typical’ she murmurs as she accepts the call, phone to her ear, ‘I’m still sick, Jeffrey, I won’t be in.’ She tells him for the 4th day in a row, as she cuts the phone not bothering to hear his response. The persistence! As if they won’t easily replace her if she was to leave or die right now. There, in bed, she has turned over in her head a thousand times, ‘what is a beautiful life?’ that tides have started to form so high and so rough she can no longer differentiate them from the sky, it’s all blurred into one. When friends fall and rise, your laughter and giggles turned into sorrow, pockets of friendships, but a weariness to call community community because as the scales fall from your eyes, there is no depth. No depth! No depth or want to hold each other close. No realisation that loving in community, loving in friendship means inconvenience, sometimes she doesn’t want to go for coffee after an 8 hour work day, but she loves her friends and their presence matters more than her need to nest sometimes. The silent ways we hurt people, she realises she is part of the problem, she’s trying to be better, but does it count for something? Her chest heaves, and an unexpected croak comes from her mouth.
‘I am creating a beautiful life,’ she whispers to the pigeon standing on the street lamp outside the window. A beautiful life she can so clearly see but in her bed-stricken state, she wonders what is the point? No one has come, which she assumes means no one cares, we are all too intertwined in our bubbles and pockets to even see beyond where we are! How can she create a beautiful life intertwined with hope, love and joy, when nobody is willing to live outside their bubbles? ‘Maybe,’ she thinks, ‘I should move to a small town. Gilmore girls vibe. Like Olive Kitteridge, small pockets of hope and lives lived in such a small vicinity, big moments of sadness and grief, but there is community in some odd way, there is some engulfment of love and hope, even if it is not perfect. I will not be alone. Maybe my big mistake was chasing a young dream and never re-evaluating it, living in the big city.’
And, it wasn’t to say her life wasn’t beautiful, but there, in bed, the rain pouring whilst she watched breeze drift through a pigeons feathers, it’s eyes closed as if this is all to there is. In bed, she lay unsure if the Black Dog that sat on her chest induced the virus inside her or, if the virus held the door open for the Black Dog, she calls Misty, to accompany her. The Black Dog, Misty, that her young self never really knew how to define the thing that was just sitting with you in silence that nobody could see or feel or understand. Unsure how to move, to be in this state, a state that appeared less often the older she got, but the depth of Misty’s snuggle as her body grew meant that despite her lack of frequency over the year(s) now, her body still grew heavy, she stayed for longer stints of time even though she frequented less often. Misty was comfortable, and her comfort grew in the knowing that, nobody has come.
‘I am creating a beautiful life.’ And so be it, she will tell herself over and over again until she falls asleep. ‘Maybe, this is life. Nobody comes when you’re ill, because they’re tired.
We’re all tired.’