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JayWhy · 05-16-2020, 09:30 PM

Life Indoors

“How do you live with it?”

He sits up in the pitch black darkness, from attempting to sleep. His face is illuminated by the light of his cell phone which reads back to him the time – it is 3:00 A.M.

“The change, the loneliness of it all.”

There is nothing going on at this time. Usually, he may opt to read the news but at this point that’s just as depressing as not doing anything at all. He lays back, rests his head against the pillow and stares off into the dark space above his head.

“The world is ending, and we’re helpless. Just laying here, nothing to do, nowhere to go.”

He twists and turns, trying to get comfortable, trying to find a place to be and feel warmth again. However, it is just cold outside now. That is metaphorical – in actuality, it’s a balmy 75-degrees fahrenheit outside but it is barren. Devoid of human life forms, the world may as well have frozen over.

“What do you do? How do you manage?”

That is the million dollar question, after all.

Jax Aittokallio is a person who prides himself on his involvement in his community, as most athletes do. He’s somebody who will volunteer at a moments notice to work events and connect with people. He offers portions of his pay to charities regularly in hopes to help better the world around him. Everybody knows him as a joyful person.

Nowadays, however, the smile has wiped from his face. He sits at his kitchen table on a webcam in a zoom call talking to the media, explaining the pains he has experienced. The days have blended together, as evidenced by his telling people to have a great weekend at the end of the call in spite of it only being Wednesday.

His hair is disheveled, his eyes are bloodshot. Immediately following the call, a colleague of mine texted to ask if I was aware of anything that happened. Well, I think we all are aware of what has happened, but we all try to avoid it or ignore it and act like things haven’t changed immensely.

The prying questions and the faces of confusion from the media serve only as a momentary reprieve for the young Aittokallio. He explained he’s donated to hospitals throughout New York in hopes to help this pass, but he isn’t able to be there to see how it helps, what it does and he feels like it does nothing at all.

He’s adjusted, from a video his wife watched online, to leaving open tabs at restaurants near the hospitals for hospital staff in hopes to be able to at least give them a meal. He says he receives messages occasionally thanking him, but it gives him little joy. He wants only for this to pass, only for them to be safe, only for the world to go back to what it was. He knows it never will.

This is the face of America nowadays, the face of a world on lockdown. We all sit indoors, staring out the window. We see the occasional person walk by, maybe a couple with children, but so few and far between that it feels almost as if they weren’t there at all and maybe we had dreamt it. We fall into a routine, but the routine only makes the day feel longer somehow as we wait to get to the next part and the next part and the next part until finally the day is over and it feels like it never even began.

This is the world we live in, the world where Tuesday is Thursday, and Wednesday is the weekend, and Saturday feels like Monday, but only on some days. It’s a world in which things are desolate and desperate and all things in between. An empty world, a quiet world, a dark world indeed.

As we move into spring, the flowers begin to bloom and the sun begins to shine. The window in his dining room shined a light through onto Jax’s face and lit it up in such a way that he looked whole again. As soon as it came, it passed again and we were reminded the nature of the world.

“How do you live with it?”

He asks, yet again, with water welling in his eyes. He hasn’t slept well, not for weeks at least, and he sits here disheveled and broken, knowing that normal isn’t normal anymore. Yet we keep on pushing, and striving, and fighting. And as the calendar turns, and the days blend together, a man walks by, and then a couple. And life has sprung once more outside.

Quote:Word Count: 780.

I've been reading a lot of columns from the 1920s or so and it got me in the mood to write on current events. I figure I may make this a regular installment where I talk about either current or past events and see what I can do with it and how I can make the story live and breath differently. Let me know your thoughts.

An old man's dream ended. A young man's vision of the future opened wide. Young men have visions, old men have dreams. But the place for old men to dream is beside the fire.