Dusk, Trying Not To Panic
By: Kathryn Dillon
Tags: Writing Prompts, Anxiety, Self, Creative Humans, Creativity

The setting: A nondescript room in a faded-beauty house. She waits to be restored to her former glory, though this particular room (once the staff dining area) was most likely never terribly impressive.

The walls are white, smudged with perhaps a century’s worth of fingerprints, awaiting the day when the already-purchased blue paint will be applied, the interlocking foam flooring will be laid down, and I’ll turn it into a workout room. The elliptical machine, 15 years old, mocks me to my right. It needs to be fixed, and I’m currently using it as a clothes rack for my hooded sweatshirt.

I remind myself that I need to borrow a lamp from one of the guest bedrooms because the fluorescent lighting in this room is starting to drive me batty.

I sit in a burgundy tufted faux-leather executive chair at a long fold-out table, gazing into the large monitor/docking station combo I brought home from my office the last day I went to work, more than two weeks ago.

Behind me, if I were to turn around, I’d see a window with a view to the back portico, and one of our gardens, which was what they called the yard according to the early 20th century blueprints we found in a secret compartment in the library. The forsythia is blooming, and the daffodils too. I crave their vibrant yellow, bright as the sun that only exists in my imagination, on this gloomy day.

My table’s surface, the same blah color as the walls, is increasingly piled with papers, as it begins to mimic my office in that building 30-odd miles down the road where I normally spend my workdays. It’s just how I roll. Organized mind, organized spreadsheets, mess of a desk.

I strive for normalcy in a time when there’s none.

Aside from the random papers, and my day planner (usually reserved for personal appointments and thoughts, while I use my Outlook calendar for work obligations — different parts of the brain, you see) scissors, thread and needle, and a couple of hacked-up t-shirts adorn the space. They’re reminders of two days ago when I was trying to make COVID-19 masks for my husband and me before he realized we had two previously-used dust masks in the basement, remnants of last summer’s outdoor sanding project.

He soaked them in rubbing alcohol and we wore them to my mom’s house to pick up some things from her basement, as she prepares to move later this month, at the most inopportune of times.

I worry, I worry, I worry.

In the background, the tail end of Governor DeWine’s daily press conference, a Q&A between various reporters and our state government, is an unexpectedly calming influence through choppy waters. I sip my quarter-glass of boxed wine as part of the ritual — Wine with DeWine, 2:00 every afternoon, all across the state (only a taste, because I’m working). Ohio’s curve is flatter than most, thanks to a sensible governor who listens to his experts. He’s given us our latest, greatest superhero, Dr. Amy Acton, director of the Ohio Department of Health.

I hear my husband moving around in the kitchen, a few feet away from my makeshift office. He always works from home, and now that I am too, his schedule perplexes me. There’s no rhyme or reason to when he eats, while I am very much like clockwork, lest my low blood sugar turn me into a raging beast (or stoke the fires of my eating disorder with the sweet control of hunger pangs).

I’m aware of the stillness. No birds (do they know something we don’t?), few cars outside, though our street is wide, and once GPS was readily available, it became a frequent cut-through for those wanting to circumvent traffic lights. The quiet is eerie, especially once the sun goes down.

It’s reminiscent of returning to my rural home town after living in the big city for a couple of years. Accustomed to the sirens and shouting and hubbub, I suddenly realized I was frightened of the silence, and that I could never really go home again.

I smell the faint sweetness of crisp-fried cabbage (if you don’t cook it too long, you won’t get that sulfur smell), and feel the spot on the ball of my foot where I burned myself cooking. Yes, yes, it IS possible to do this — if you wear sandals around the house, as I always do, and flip whatever’s on the baking tray a bit too zealously. This, this is how you end up with a small, piping-hot piece of perfectly-browned tofu stuck under your foot.

It makes me smile, though, the ridiculousness of burning myself there, preparing the evening meal, multi-tasking a bit too much, as I talked on the phone to my mom at the same time.

Rushing thoughts, rushing tasks, slow the mind, quiet space. Shoulders fall, eyes close, breathing slows. The sun dips below the horizon (will we see that pink supermoon tonight, through the inevitable clouds?), and soon I’ll put a record on the turntable, join my love in the living room, sip a snifter of brandy, and sink into nightfall.