Earthquakes

It all started before it even started. 

Nine pm the night before, and I’m all anxious. I’ve spent the day writing, sequestered away in my writing hovel of a room that overlooks the snow dusted Wasatch, drinking shots of espresso from miniscule sky blue ceramic cups, and moving from desk to chair to kitchen to toilet in a sort of quiet electric track. I was consumed by words—the New York Times, the local paper, texts and more texts, the Microsoft doc in front of me. Thoughts were heavy but full of hope, and I wrote and wrote, page after page, three times on the same essay. 

By late afternoon, the wind blew so strong that the window panes rattled in their grooves. It rattled me off my screen, finally made me look up and acknowledge earth. It was stuffy inside and I opened the window closest to me up wide. Social distancing and home isolation made the normal ambient outside noise quieter than usual but it was pierced, singularly, by an abrupt wailing siren. It seemed almost like a hint: a harbinger of doom, the clarion sound of warning, and I felt the trickle of my own anxiety seep in at the edges. I know the feeling well. I know my body; I know the signs. Do I venture outside to calm myself? Do I breathe fresh air and run until my legs ache and my heart beats against my ribs like the drumbeat of something tribal and ancient? It usually seems to help. But I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but sit there, opened up; and I let the gusting in of dust from the backyard and bacteria from the street and the freshness of the grass sweep over me. 

It’s all surreal—living in the state of a pandemic. The “once upon a time” daily march of just a few days ago becomes a tiptoe, like life needs to be lived gingerly and treated with kid gloves. As though the normalcy we took for granted is too permeable and weak to sustain us—like if I push too much, if I think too much, if I wonder too much, it will all rend, the whole fabric of society, of my heart, my life as I know it in tatters. 

I tell myself over and over that I am ok. That the rising anxiety is simply what happens at the end of the evening, when thoughts of bedtime and snippets of the day gather. And I’m tired from writing and thinking and opening my heart in ways that make it raw. 

I go to sleep. 

It’s still dark out the next morning when the room starts to sway, when the rumble gurgles up from the bowels of the earth. I am already awake, but still in bed. I know instantly what is happening and say out loud, “no no no no no.” I am terrified and immobile, certain the house will collapse. I am frozen to the spot, curling tight like a pink shrimp in a hot pan, bare shoulders tight against my ears, and knees to my chin. I start to cry; I am afraid. I want it to stop; it gets stronger. The lamp falls over on my nightstand, my phone clatters to the floor and flickers bright then goes dark as the power from the charger is lost and gone. 

Once things feel like they’re slowing, once the earth seems to right itself, the room is consumed in a stillness so precarious that I don’t trust it, sure it will break any moment. No car alarms, no flashing lights, no sirens, no cries. The power is gone, the detail is gone, everything gone. The house is a place of lumps and indistinct contours, lost from itself. Only the pendant lights still move, back and forth like three warning pendulums, or thuribles dangling from chains, wafting incense, prayers to god made visible. The motion will not stop. They are silent bells. The sway is the reminder.

I dress in the complete pitch black, needing desperately to hold my kids, crying to myself in the dark, my hands too shaky to pull on socks. All the books are slumped over on each other like lazy tin soldiers. The glasses in the sink are on their sides; the speaker on the counter is on its side; the pillows on my writing chair dented from where I sat yesterday, anticipating something but not understanding. 

I’m in the light of the kitchen with him, our eyes stunned. Neither of us speak. What is there to say? Did you feel that? We both did. Are you ok? We aren’t sure. 

We speak in arms that hold tight and don’t let go. Kids that find those same arms and fall into us separately, together. But by the time they wake, they are all smiles and I see that I am the only one who is troubled. They are just waking up, another day of homeschool and novels and elaborate breakfasts, eggs to order and choices of toast, and they just want mama. I hug them tight, feeling the solid hefts of their steady backs. They breathe in and out, the unfettered sort of breath that trusts that things are normal and their heartbeats are calm and sure. I try to grasp the cadence of these heartbeats; I try to let it affect the pulse in my wrist, I force that pulse to control my heart, hoping my entire circulatory system will mimic that fixed, unworried beat.

Maybe their hearts to my heart are like the call and response of animals in conversation. “It’s ok,” they’re telling me. “It’s ok.”

I believe them; I don’t believe them. They are young. What do they know? They’re still sanitized from the backwards track of trauma that won’t loom its ugly head till middle age. 

The fear of this 5.7 earthquake outside Salt Lake City on March 18, 2020 is like this, like the flicker at the end of a film strip: It is 1989. I live in a neighborhood nestled in the gold foothills of Northern California. I am almost 13. One day in October there is an earthquake—just another one in a string of them really. But this one is big. 7.2. I was at a piano lesson in Morgan Hill. I was sitting at the piano, my hands on the keys when it started. My teacher ran out of the room and I followed her, the carpet undulating below our feet. (I close my eyes now and still see how the ground under our feet looked like the hills outside the window. Rolling. Everything rolling.) I got home to the news on the television, news that stayed on for weeks. Total destruction. The freeway, the Bay Bridge, Candlestick Park. Entire blocks of buildings in SF. Wreckage in Santa Cruz. Images of familiar parts of our life—driving into The City from the East Bay, Giants games on Sunday afternoons, the solid places we would go without thinking, now falling over frail and pathetic, no longer institutions. Just dust. There and then not there. A thing then not a thing. Over and over and over. 

Then, I remember 1983. I am in first grade. I see Mrs. Gish telling us to duck and cover, her body moving like a windsock. We’ve just come in from recess and the classroom is dim and quiet. As we moved to curl up in tiny balls of human flesh and Velcro sneakers under our baby desks covered in pencil marks and eraser droppings, plastic chairs tip backwards onto the floor, a light from the ceiling crashes onto a desk. 

There is fear swallowed (There must be! But I don’t remember this.); this is life in California as a kid. I skip home, a mile along the paseo with my bestie, and we steal a pomegranate out of a tree and break it open on the sharp edges of a boulder that is as high as our shoulders. We eat the red seeds while we chat and walk, holding pomegranate rinds in our hands like petite saucers and shards of glass. Our fingers are red with pomegranate blood by the time we make it home, but this means nothing. We wipe our hands on the thighs of our pants legs, we run into our respective houses, we eat dinner, we sleep. 

These will be traumas deterred. 

And so. 

Today I am shook. Today I shake. My hands won’t stop. They themselves become tiny tremors that can’t button or zip, that can barely type. At 13 they somehow still played the piano; at seven they held fistfuls of arils. They held steady back then; today they will try.

I don’t understand pandemics yet but earthquakes I get. Somehow this made fear real.  

I reel.