You haven’t heard from me in over a year. What was good is still good. What was bad is worse everywhere. I try not to turn the dial too far in either direction. But I turned 40 last month and saw my body in the dressing room mirror at Old Navy and sighed. So, I turned the dial just a little. I began working out more, and soon I’ll be working out enough. The price of protein powder has gone up since the last time I treated myself like a project. Punishment has always been expensive, but even simple pleasures sting. I turn the dial the other way and make cookies because Shawn asks. I use the good eggs with the orange yolks. I roll the balls of dough in sugar and cinnamon. They leave the oven as round as coins and cracked like parched earth. They taste like they came from a bakery. Josh asks how much butter is in the recipe. I say there’s enough to keep the cookies soft and chewy for days. The dial turns itself back to a quiet middle place without my help.
I still bake pie and cheesecake for a restaurant in a nearby town. And I draw most days. The days I don’t, I’m irritable. For nine or ten months, I’ve been drawing in black and white. A friend from college is a tattoo artist. I used to get a tattoo every few years. Now, I try to get one every quarter. The black and white drawings go into a folder on my phone for future tattoos. I never think about the pain or the healing, just like when I’m making a pie, I don’t consider how many steps there are, how long it takes to get from flour, butter, and sugar to eating. Somewhere at the end of it all, there’s either money or there isn’t. It seems like the next logical step is to become a tattoo artist myself. But I don’t do well at the sight of blood, and sometimes it’s enough to draw without worrying how I’m going to sell it.
Plumbers dug up our front yard last year because the sewer line disintegrated. The lead plumber said he’d never seen anything like it in his 40 years of business. Days later, he came back to us and said it was starting to happen all over the city. Time is a hungry animal. I try not to think about what will go next. The roof, maybe. Or the foundation. Don’t think about it. The yard is full of rabbits. The basement is home to large crickets. We live in the city where the night music is gunshots and fast cars and sirens. Shawn said he had the attic windows open one midnight and heard a woman screaming a block or two away. Before he could tell which direction, she went silent. I’ve lived in these parts of town for over 20 years. Nothing human fazes me anymore, but I wish it did.
The last encounter that startled me was with a raccoon on the sidewalk. I thought it was eating another animal, but as I got closer, I could see it chewed its own leg in the dark. Josh and I gave it plenty of space and continued our walk. Soon, there was the scent of lilacs, Josh’s favorite flower. I’m tempted to make it simple, to say the good outweighs the bad, but we passed the raccoon again on the way back home. It was still trying to pull the sickness out with its teeth. The next morning, we drove by, and it was dead. Later, gone. Not even a spot on the sidewalk. I hope the good is heavier, but I think about that raccoon all the time, and I don’t smell lilacs every day.
Which is why I keep my hands busy. I feel like a spider or a bird pulling bits from myself and elsewhere to make the world smaller around me. Even if it’s bad out there, it can be good enough in here. But it’s not always the dying raccoon or the temporary balm of lilacs. Sometimes, it’s the possum climbing the neighbor’s stairs like it lives in the house. Sometimes, it’s the chimney swifts shooting into the dusk and writing invisible script as they torpedo mosquitoes. Sometimes, it’s the man running shirtless during the hot center of the day who looks at me as much as I look at him. The dial turns round and round until it measures nothing. I feel it all and even more. Most times, it’s like that, if I’m honest. And even when it’s not, even when the raccoon is dying, it tries everything it knows to stay alive.