Chapter Seven: Searching for Meaning
April 27, 2020
Dear Diary,
Today I awoke to the most curious sound. It was as though someone was rapping on our bedroom window, except that our window is on the second-story and completely inaccessible from the outside.
I hastily put on my spectacles just in time to witness a small bird intermittently pecking at our window with his bill. Fearing this bird portended a Hitchcock-inspired doom, Hubby and I closed all our windows and continued sheltering in place.
As the morning wore on, we couldn’t help but continue to think about the bird and what his presence meant. Was he a harbinger? We turned on the news to see if we could glean some insight there.
Alas, the news was much the same as it had been for days, except that the ever-present death toll counter on the television screen now increases by hundreds every time you turn away. Five thousand Americans lost in the span of a weekend. Interviews of distraught family members, unable to hold their loved one’s hand, or say their final goodbyes, bear witness to the virus’ cruelty. Young and old alike, the shapeshifting virus strikes indiscriminately, ravaging the lungs of one, the brain of another, and the heart of yet another.
Images of thousands of cars lined up at food banks across the country paint a stark and heartbreaking economic reality alongside it. Some begin to question if the cure is worse than the disease. Why should we all suffer, they ask, when we aren’t all equally vulnerable? Why should we stay inside, when it is so nice at the beach?
Diary, the more that I thought about the bird, the more I wanted him to mean something about what we are currently experiencing. To prove that there is some order to everything and a divinity guiding it.
I glanced one more time out the window, and the answer was staring right back at me. It was a large moth trapped between two panes of glass, which the bird must have found quite tantalizing.
It was no miracle, it was no sign, it was just nature following the laws of nature and a good reminder to keep listening to the scientists who devote their life’s work to such smart study.
Sincerely,
Maya