Four

“Dad, the birds outside sound happy,” my daughter told me. “Don’t they know what’s going on?”

The chirping was the only noise. The whole world turned quiet, or inward. My daughter was coming-of-age during a global pandemic. She was becoming a woman while the world was collapsing around her. Then a neighbour began mowing their lawn. 

“No, honey, the birds don’t know. The world is still normal for them. It’s just for us that the world has changed.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

My neighbour needed something to do. We all need something to do. We can’t just wait indoors for the next two years. Fear and panic result from being inside ourselves too much. A house is symbolic of oneself, and we can only stay inside for so long. Then we get irritable. We need to connect with things outside of ourselves. We need to connect to our neighbours. That’s why one is now mowing. We need something to do and we need someone to connect with.

My daughter went back to playing with her toys inside her dollhouse. I looked outside the window, and I felt like the world had become imaginary. The world seemed unreal. I went to the front door and I opened it. I stood in the doorway and looked out and everything seemed exactly the same. But I felt inside myself something like dread and doom. It was lingering underneath and I sensed that most of us had this same feeling. Something was going to happen. This is just the beginning.

“Do we deserve it, dad?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t think I did anything bad.”

“You didn’t, dear.”

“I think someone else did.”