“Throw me to the wolves and I will return leading the pack.”
Stockholm Syndrome takes less than a week to re-wire your synapses and alter your cognitive composition. Before you remember what day it is, you’ve fallen in love with your kidnapper, married a bank robber and had eight children with a mass murderer. If lockdown is our Stockholm, then consider us brainwashed.
We’ve stopped using dates. Hallucinations will kick in soon.
The butterflies are back.
Bees are going to save us, they just need more time.
In Portugal, animals are running wild in the streets. Plants are growing through the pavement in Utah. Bears and deer are wandering the squares of Baku. Waters are running clear as the Yangtze remembers what it once was.
The sky is a blue we’ve never seen before. The vapour trails are gone, replaced by bats and owls and flying stinging insects of the exotic, painful variety.
Science has its hands full.
You can grow new fingernails in three days.
Imagine what the Earth can do.
Before the lockdown there were parenting moments. Connection. Memories. Weekends. Holidays came and went.
But I was learning the important stuff happens in the gaps. The day-to-day is where life is built, the foundations laid, where the magic and the mystery are created. Lockdown is giving us the most precious thing of all: memories.
Do memories work because no moment ever goes away? Somewhere, sometime, they play on-and-on, like a needle stuck in the last groove of a record, skipping for eternity. If you know where to look.
Memories are stained onto the residue that is the fabric of time. Looking back, you feel them, see them piled up, clamouring for your attention. And it’s not the biggest memories that win the battle. Nostalgia is made of the small things that sneak up through the cracks, the odd, whimsical moments that made an idle Wednesday or nondescript Thursday carve their presence on forever. They make your life. That make you. They make your children who they are.
Newsflash: our jobs are superfluous.
Our children aren’t.
No doubt calculus will be useful one day, but learning to ride a bike sounded like a much better idea. Unless you are Pythagoras. Or whoever invented Algebra.
In the Old World, would I have seen Alice riding a bike for the first time? Would I have witnessed the magic in the maelstrom of work emails, phone calls and meetings, the over importance I, like everyone else, placed on their work? Perhaps, perhaps not.
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
“Alice,” I say, as we cross an empty road, forgetting to look left, forgetting to look right. “The new world has pedals.”
“You’ve got a bike you can ride it if you like.”
“Pink Floyd?”
“Frozen,” she says, setting the pedals to the mathematical angles of cycling. She straightens the handlebars and takes a deep breath.
I say it isn’t.
And she crashes into a lamppost, her leg twists around the frame. A tear tries not to fall from her eye.
She looks at me for reassurance. “Doesn’t hurt. I’m a big girl.”
What am I supposed to say?
“Yes it does. Your leg is twisted around a lamppost.” I keep looking at her. I know she doesn’t want my help. Not yet.
She get up. Tries again.
And crashes again.
Grazed knee, bloody elbow.
Up. Again.
I think of skateboarding, resilience, time dilation and the day I learnt to ride a bike. The details are hazy, but the revelation is still there. Learning to ride a bike fucking hurts.
Alice crashes again.
And I help her up.
And she is smiling.
Because she has tasted freedom and she doesn’t know what it is but she knows it’s important.
So do I.
And she limps home, blood slowly drying on her knees.
As it should when you learn to ride a bike.
As it always has.
As it always will.