The Anchorite

letting time wash over

For the most part, they just thought—contemplating their beliefs, praying, considering their place in what they knew of the universe. They spoke to visitors and offered advice and prayer, and probably spent many, many hours sitting alone and in silence, letting time wash over them.

from “All shall be well: what the medieval anchorites can teach us about self-isolating” by Joanna Pidcock in Prospect

I imagine her at the end of the day bombarded with ducks (the ones we sat and watched at Kenneth Hahn Park) their squawks and perhaps terrible faces coming at her, Carl unaware of my chaotic thoughts, sitting cross-legged on the floor, adjusting the cool mist tubing, his preternatural patience, me kneeling on the bed over her, adjusting the mask that connects to her trach, her eyes open and looking at through into me. The ducks come to me like a terrible movie, the kind that everyone likes and that I hate, that I walk out of sick and trembling and that I assume Sophie, too, hates (and why, why do I assume this?), the overwhelming attack on the senses, everything everywhere all at once, and then I imagine her peaceful, as my friend J said the other day when I was talking on the phone with her. I am not adjusted yet, I said, and I wanted to cry, to tell her that I might never adjust, that I don’t know if Sophie is happy or unhappy, terrified or content, and those extremes could be my own projections or they could be her reality that I intuit somehow, still, thirty years in. I think of our little room at the Shell Beach Inn in La Jolla, and it’s 1997 and her hair is short and curly and she sleeps in a crib and when I drive the rental car, I glance up at the rearview mirror and I see her looking at through into me (things are closer than they seem), a language all its own from her to me and me to her, her head capped in curls, her eyes liquid pools. She’s like a small nun, an anchorite, I think, now, her life is shrinking even as I struggle to reconcile the new now and my, our capacity to do everything tend to quality of life, abide here in the now. Always just now. J said, She might be peaceful, and that appeases me for the moment but not this moment, also now, when I want to scoop her up into my arms and run, run all the way away.