I was driving home from work on a busy, two-lane road and the electric car in front of me slammed on its brakes. Given the gun culture in America, I try to be the antithesis of an angry driver. I also stopped and cursed in my head when, from the front left of her car, the smallest turtle waddled with all its might into the oncoming traffic which had not stopped. The driver of the electric car opened her door and looked at me with an expression of apology/query and I gave her two thumbs up and waved like a maniac toward the turtle.
She brazenly walked into oncoming traffic with her arm upraised, stopping the cars, and waddling after the turtle delicately. She carried it to the cool, green grass of a nearby yard and ran back to her car. She looked at me smiling as I cheered her on with reckless abandon, waving my arms maniacally. Before getting in, she placed her fingers together in the shape of a heart and I did the same.
Inexplicably, I cried as I drove away, Some buried and unreachable part of my humanity burbled toward the surface. It was raw and ugly to feel so deeply after such intentional numbness. I have, for so long, kept the vulnerable parts of my soul from injury. Feeling nothing is the fastest route to some kind of benign, meaningless existence and it also serves to deny the very existence of grief when it inevitably knocks.
The pain of the last few years has been so grievous; in the hospital, gurney after gurney traveled with me down the elevators toward the morgue as I removed my respirator, my skin raw and bleeding from wearing it overly tight in the hopes that I would protect myself and my children from Covid. The comments of neighbors who didn't believe in the virus scoffing at the vaccine when I had only hours before watched a patient I scanned removed from life support in a sterile room devoid of loved ones and family because the risk of spread was simply too high.
I don't cry when I go into the King Soopers where my neighbors were murdered anymore, but I did the first time after it was remodeled and the bullets were extracted from the drywall. I had stopped at the store on my way to pick up my four-year-old from school and unbenounced to me, sobbed uncontrollably while her teacher held me, murmuring gentle platitudes in my ear. The new version of the store is prettier. It's clean. Some of the same workers are still there and greet us with smiles and warmth, despite our collective trauma. I love them for those smiles. I think they might be the bravest people I know.
We've had an inconceivably wet summer and we are, for the moment, out of drought. I look at the hollow-eyed trauma of our friends who lost homes in the Marshall Fire and their fear is echoed in my own heart when the wind barrels off the Flatirons to the west of our home. But it is wet this year, I tell myself. It was a once-in-a-lifetime fire. It was a bad couple of years. Disbelieve your fear, I whisper, as though saying it will make it so.
What an idiotic gesture saving that turtle was. It was dangerous for her and, in the scope of the universe, what is the life of one turtle? But I need to drink the relentless hope, joy, and compassion of that lone woman stopping rush hour traffic to save the tiniest turtle on the planet. I need her to exist so that I can have the courage to be a human here in a way that has meaning and is not just hollow nothingness guarding itself from future trauma. I need her wonder to be instructive in how I choose to live my remaining years. I want to harness her courage and her love and her vulnerability and live every future minute like each of my actions has the power to reverberate ad infinitum.
I think life has cycles and this cycle for many of us has been one disproportionately weighted with grief and loss. I think, even in a "post" pandemic era, most of us are still going through the process of healing and making sense of what those years were. And if things have felt a little off or meaningless or uncertain, it's because they have been and often are.
I want more late, high-summer nights fueled with rich conversation, good wine, and food shared collectively. I want to cry when music moves me to do so. I want to fall in love a hundred more times with turtle-saving humans and I want to believe that our species are multi-faceted and variable and I need to foster a belief that if a human could do something good or something bad, they more often than not will stop their car despite the idiocy.
I need and desperately want to continue to be the type of human who witnesses the struggles of others, who authentically digs into the marrow of my own existence, and who offers empathy to the smaller and more vulnerable. I want to open myself to the startling depths of grief as a human being on planet Earth because it is far superior to the nothing I have chosen to feel for the last several years. I want to fracture in all my weakest joints and for my humanity to pour forth in an exuberant show of grief and joy and light and dark and cacophony. I want to be fully present for these numbered, endless days because they are ticking by at an alarming clip.
I can't help but wonder how your heart is? I wonder what moves in your very marrow and what experiences have led you to ecstasy or inextricable grief? What metamorphosis have you undergone and who are you now? The same Matthieu, I suspect, who I knew all those years ago. And yet, I imagine the way the light refracts has changed. I would certainly know you, but there would be more depth in your reflection now and layers that weren't there in our first meeting.
Our next few years, I think, shall be the transformation of the phoenix. We will be unrecognizably the same.
<3
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