Fault Lines

A week ago, the earth upended and the floor underneath me rolled. Somehow I felt it coming in the unease of the air, urgent at the window. It was warning me, but I didn’t know of what and felt only the encroaching fear and so had swallowed, the night before, a cocktail of dread and two pretty pink oval-shaped Benadryl that pulled me deeply into sleep. 

I swear for one moment, just past five this morning, the earth started grumbling again. I google it; I see that I’m correct. I also see that there have been 272 earthquakes in the past week, disruptions that I never felt, callings unheeded. I don’t know why the fear consumes me so much, when this conversation between earth and sky—between the substance beneath my feet and the air around me—starts. Nor do I understand how this swallowing threatens, for the likelihood that I’m falling off a precipice into sudden death is not truly there, but it feels that way. Just utterly terrifying. Like I will fall out of the sky, like I will be crushed. Like both are inevitabilities. 

I’m worried. My teeth ache, my bones feel weary. I’m breathing in the atmosphere of collective anxiety, through the open windows, through the vents. I inhale this worry and hold my breath, unable to release it back out. This feeling is stickier than the actual virus and my lungs are lined with it, barbs of fear digging deep, their contagion getting closer and closer to infecting my heart. Again and again I forget to exhale. I cannot seem to breathe. 

Here’s what I do, when I worry. I start to assign that worry to things. It’s easier than just sitting with it somehow, and with a story comes the false assurance of explanation in the midst of crisis. They’re all just words, I tell myself. Words as symbols on a page to rewrite and cover and bury the heart of something I feel afraid of too. What is it? What is down there? 

I’m so worried about a certain child. It’s difficult for me to parse the real story of a life so far, and how we got here, to this exact second, and knowing my own fumbling movements in the game, I place blame squarely on myself. It doesn’t make sense, it’s a bad habit, but I do it anyway. I think of the dishonesty we raised her with, the lies, the new and confusing insistence on trusting yourself and bucking old-world convention. It’s a school of hard knocks, this having to live real life, this insistence to “adult.” And I wonder at this balance: how much do parents need to lose themselves inside their kids’ lives? When is it time for kids to take responsibility for their own lives? When will it cease to be my fault, for being careful and careless and distracted and loving and overbearing and changing and human?

It’s a strange conversation because none of us know. We don’t know what’s real; we don’t know what comes next. We never knew. Knowing was a lie, another story, another ending that was never meant to be and was promised in ways that only promised to be disappointments. We had to let so much go, and I think subconsciously I fear the rushing flow of that loss, and I hold on tight with teeth that clamp down so hard on nothing but the hard edge of each other. And they hurt all the time with this effort, and I imagine, an interpretation without a mirror, that the edges of them look like chipped porcelain teacups, with graying delicate webs of miniscule hairline cracks. 

It’s strange to be this way, standing here anyway, bare in our unknowing. It’s strange to feel how I feel, and to judge myself for my gestures toward selfishness even while I let myself be selfish. It feels like I am the cause of everything bad—emotional instability, their instability, the earth’s instability—but I am unable to let it go. It’s as though everything unstable is caused by this egotism, little earthquakes of undoing every time I drive away and ignore something “important” to choose myself. And even as I hold the willful allowance—really, the conscious choice—of these earthquakes inside me, I am convinced of their ripple effect, the lashings of an untamed wildness inside of me that causes injury outside of me. 

Or maybe this is just the role I have written for myself. 

I can change that story. That’s easy enough. (Write/rewrite/write/rewrite.)

The earth shakes, then my hands shake, and with those trembling hands, I pick up my pen.

Right now, I keep choosing my writing. I keep choosing words. I keep choosing that I want to string them together in convoluted sentences as a way to write my own belief upon paper in a notebook in hopes that it etches, too, oaths on my heart. 

But what I also want is to be downstairs, helping Jude with his homework. There are just no two ways about it. I want to inch back into motherhood with the daily menial tasks of it. The chores and the overseeing element of everything feeling so sweetly in control and under one roof—only I keep wandering out from under that roof, into the sunshine, into the wind and rain, into different, unexplored spaces like a curious little explorer. And then I want to go back. 

I texted my sister in law after the earthquake. I told her that I was scared. She texted back to me: “You’re moving and shaking all on your own.” 

I am; I am going to crack.