Orbit

Before all of this began, you had been like a planet having forgotten the fact of your orbit, the fact of the sun and of gravity, and most importantly of the curve gravity has engraved through time and space for your travels. You had long forgotten that curve, that invisible channel that could hold your bulk like a snail in a shell, that you could slide down with the joy and effortlessness of a child. The last time in your life you had lived in such a way, for more than a fleeting moment, was in fact when you were a child. Then, you'd traipsed with ease and curiosity across a land blanketed in red pine needles and dotted with ant-lion dens, where the guttural banter of ravens tumbled from the treetops and was the only sound to interrupt the sighing of the wind as it moved through the gaps in the hills.

By now, however, time and space had become nothing more than voids to be filled in all the ways you had devised to fill them. Ease gave way to struggle; obligation insidiously supplanted curiosity. The movement of your body and mind in space, so unlike the child on the slide, was all effort, an oarsman thrashing furiously to move no further at all than the current would take him with ease. So much effort, so much doing, all to scrabble through the time and space of your life as if there could be no more grace about the matter than that of a fish flopping on a wooden dock. How, you asked yourself, could you fail to remember the forces that held you to your elliptical path without the slightest effort of your own? How, from your days of prodding ant lions with pine needles the color of rust, could you not recall that gravity was on your side and that the curve longed to bear your weight? That the struggle was entirely of your own making? But, you remind yourself, that was before.

Now a tiny virus, and the threat of its spread, has brought everything you've devised to a sudden halt. You've crossed out all of your calendar's neat entries; your lists are meaningless, your plans and activities moot. You blink at the open space, vaguely sensing its familiarity, and feel yourself sinking into the perpetual present. You find, finally, that there is nothing more to do than to release the oars, let them rest in their locks. It is a strange sensation, one that recalls you to your childhood - the feeling of hot sand on bare feet as you crouched beneath the pines, and the croaking of the ravens that observed from above. Though idle now, you slowly perceive that you are indeed still moving; and despite the calluses on your hands and the trembling of your muscles, you can sense the curve like a hammock at your back. You trace its edge with your toe and it feels like hot sand. And so you relax into orbit, allow your body to sling through space and time by the grace of forces far more powerful than your own. It is only the effort that has gone, you realize, the effort and the assumption of its necessity.

Assumptions are convincing things, especially when, as in your case, they are girded by the habits of a lifetime. But recent events had forced such a dramatic halt to your habits that the whole structure began to erode. Drifting along now, you begin to trust in the current, and you have the growing sense that there is nothing left to do but experiment. Your muscles still twitch to grasp the oars, but in your neglect you are not even sure if they are still there, or if perhaps they have slipped away. At any rate, your calluses have begun to slough away and your back straighten a bit as you learn to inhabit the curve.

In the mornings, you wake with little to do save notice the buttery gold of the morning light as it bleeds through the curtains, the tender pressure of Jacob's heel as it rests on your hip, the muffled thump as the cat jumps to the floor in the room next, the slowness of your own breathing. In the absence of effort, you notice that the forces to which you are learning to submit not only carry you effortlessly on, but also compel your senses to greater acuity. Had you ever before heard the grating gnaw of a black squirrel's teeth upon the husk of a walnut atop your garden fence? Had you ever marveled as a fat spider, ostensibly poised in mid-air, plumbed its unseen design? With no intention of any other pursuit, had you ever tried to feel the grains of sand rolling like ball-bearings in the unimaginable space between the soles of your feet and the ground? You admit that you have become attuned to subtleties to which you had been oblivious before. You take note of the unspoken thoughts revealed in the eyes of your children; you are newly keen to the twinklings of an inner world divulged in one look, one word, one gesture, one postural change.

And so you do what you can, which isn't much - bike rides, art projects, cooking, gardening, dancing - all the while noticing. What you notice most is that the further you lean into the curve, the more deliberately you occupy your orbit, the more you become like the child whistling down the slide. You are alternately joyful and curious, and you know now that you cannot go back; not simply because you don't want to, though of course you do not, but because you can't. The pull of orbit is too strong to be resisted, and besides, sparing a moment's time some miles back, you glanced down to find that your oars had indeed slipped from their locks. At any rate, you've already bought the ticket, non-refundable, and all that remains for you to do is to grab your suitcase full of ant-lions and black squirrels, the calls of ravens, grains of sand and spider's webs, to journey to the station, and discover whatever destination lies ahead.