The closing scene of “Murder on the Orient Express,” as Hercule Poirot solves the case. My neighbor Ruth and I saw the film two years ago, reclining in the then-new theater. An Agatha Christie fan, she wanted to go. Turned out I loved it.
Ruth’s gone two months now. Gone before the world had to stay at home.
Her world had already become closed in. Having to rest on the bench in front of her kitchen window as she watered her flowers and herbs. Her lungs under attack by the drugs that saved her eight years before. She and her daughter had to fight for the bone marrow transplant when she was 66.
I catch the end of the film on TV and remember the luxury of going to the movies.
Now I stay at home alone. Read novels in two days. Work at the stacks of magazines, ripping out recipes and useful info and pages for collages. Watch DVDs before adding them to the box for give-away. And movies on TV.
Tish Rivers in the beginning of “If Beale Street Could Talk”: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.”
I half-joke (half-longing) to Sarah that I can come stand outside the window where they sit at the table for dinner. Emma laughs her glorious first-grade laugh.
TV news shows a man meeting the newborn who makes him a great-grandfather, through glass. A man reads to his wife in a nursing home, through glass.
At the computer, I try to break the habit of touching my face.
Julien Lévi in “The World That We Knew” by Alice Hoffman: “This is what it feels like to be alone, he would have written to Lea if he could. You hear more and see more. You’re a part of the world around you. Ants under the leaves, the clouds moving by.”
My shoulders press into the corner of the sectional sofa, the book atop a pillow on my lap.
The shells in shades of blue tinkle against each other all day where they hang outside the door, which I keep open all day long. The sunlight and the clouds move from the small window near the door across the windows above the sofa to the window that faces the backyard, where the light slants and softens across my pages. The calico cat that has claimed my backyard looks up from the cushioned chair where it curls, where it licks itself clean in the mornings. We look at each other, if it’s awake yet, in the mornings when I open the blinds while brushing my teeth.
