The day nothing happens

The Midwestern stiff-upper-lip stoic in me would probably say it like this: I am not unfamiliar with trauma. Pick up one of my essays and chances are good a little sliver of something that’s hurt me will be in there, if only obliquely. I think of what I’ve encountered in my life as a kind of Goldilocks pain—just enough to make me sympathetic to the pain of the other without destroying my humanity.

Last night, while out for a walk, our sweet little dog Biscuit was attacked and bitten by a bigger dog that had somehow escaped its owner. I’ll spare you the details. It was scary and violent—for all of us. I had to wash his blood off my arms.

We spent a few hours at the emergency vet and thankfully Biscuit didn’t need stitches. He’s home now, and medicated, and sleeping on the bed, his head in one of those big plastic cones to keep him from licking his wounds. We haven’t done much today but take care of odds and ends. I’ve got a kitchen sink full of dishes I’ll gratefully clean up later, anything to keep my hands busy. I’ve learned from experience that there are simply empty hours—irredeemable nothings—you just have to get through.

It’s OK if you’ll let it be.

Even if it’s not.

I’ve also learned to think a little differently about the un-traumatized hours that come my way. When the pain isn’t a sharp stab in the ribs but a kind of unspeakable ache. Those are good hours, too—if I’ll let them be. I can go outside and the sky is doing that thing it does, blowing puffs of clouds around, filling the world with color and light. I can listen to a red-winged blackbird and marvel at the fact that there was a first time I heard its call. I would’ve been tiny. Too young for words. By the time I had words, the sound had already become a memory. Sometimes when I hear a blackbird singing now, that’s the real memory: the time before words.

Take away the trauma and the wonder of your days—what’s left? The days nothing happens. Nothing noteworthy or front of mind. Days that serve the purpose of creating space between the plot points in your script, that are part of the slow drip of who you are, not the flood. Essential and unremembered days. Quiet days. Bland. These are perhaps the ones I like best. Maybe it’s the midwesterner in me again. I want to sing my hymns to flatness, distance, emptiness. Dust settling on roadside wildflowers—that’s drama enough for me.

I remember writing a poem during the early days of the pandemic, when we were all stuck at home and the calendar lost all meaning. When we were all bored and also scared to death. I thought about it today because to get through traumatic moments like last night—I guess this is what I’m saying—I have to remind myself that quiet ones exist, too, and are the most common.

The Day Nothing Happens

The day nothing happens
happens again,
white space on the page
I write my name on.
Nothing to remember,
nothing to forget. The sky
oblivious to its reflection
on the marsh. My son eating
toast, crunching away,
turning pages in a book.
My little problems—
world-ending at 3 a.m.—
like the toaster's glowing coils
cooling, like the knife
I scrape over a burned piece.
The rag I left in the sink
could save me,
offering itself to the light.
A stained coffee mug.
A word said just right.
A blackbird in the forsythia.

That rag in the sink is what I was thinking about. The dishes waiting on me as soon as I’ve typed this last sentence. The thing that saves me.