I. March

Coming back to the river trail was like learning to walk again. Time makes unfamiliar those grooves in the asphalt I thought I had memorized, and though there was something like muscle memory moving me along the sloping peaks and valleys, underneath was the feeling that I was a stranger here, that I would turn a corner and be lost. I had already been plucked out of time and space by a pandemic, sent home and doomed to orbit the same few household objects: a futon in the back room; a laptop with my professors and friends trapped inside, chanting “hello? Can you hear me? Can you see me?”; the coffee maker in the kitchen. So here – at the end of the world, against the risk of uprooting myself further – I was retracing my steps.

One foot in front of the other, I learned to listen again. To see again. To feel welcome again in my own backyard. I followed the river’s soft but insistent rush, letting it fill my ears and pull me back into that smooth center of sound. It was pierced every so often by the sharp click of bicycle wheels, and I would move out of the way as a parade of steel-faced professional racers or parents chasing their zig-zagging children rolled by. Further along, the trees thickened and stretched out over the water to my left, while a field opened up on my right. The wind ran its fingers through both – the brilliantly silent yellow waves of grass on one side answered the deep green rustling of dry branches on the other. I noticed a dip in the grassy ledge that overlooked the water and ventured off the trail. Half stepping, half sliding down, I landed in a secluded patch of sand and a pool of water nearly cut off from the rest of the river – it wasn’t as good for fishing as the pier nearby, which made it the perfect spot for exploring with my sister as a child or smoking with my friends as a teenager. I dug my heels into the sand and moved as close to the water as my aversion to wet socks would let me. I let myself soak in these memories for a while, but eventually, inevitably, it was time to climb back up and keep moving.

The more I noticed – the more attention I paid to the birds circling and landing above me, the turtles ambling off into the grass below me, and the rhythmic movements of runners and dogwalkers around me – the more familiar each step became. I breathed deeper, relaxed into the movement of my legs, found a momentum that had escaped me for so long. I reached that crucial split in the trail, the one that would take me towards the bridge, right up to sandy banks, perfect rocks for skipping, and the edge of that pulsing river heart itself – but I could go no farther. Separating me from the rest of those memories and stopping the pull of my feet in their tracks was a collage of caution tape and wooden barriers. The water, as it turns out, had been more insistent than soft in the time I was away. Beyond the garish black and yellow wall, already half-tattered by weather and time, I could see the roots of trees turned skyward, benches half-submerged, debris swirling in pools before flushing out to meet the river again. I had not noticed how high the water was until now – how long had I been gone? How was it that everything was different now, just when it was becoming familiar again? I had no choice but to turn around and begin the long walk back. Back to my cluster of objects, to that echo chamber whose favorite phrases were the daily recounting of death and disease. The world was ending, and it seems – despite my best efforts – I had walked right into it, headed home all over again.

II. June

It is a daily ritual movement – slip on a pair of shoes by the door, skip the third porch step from the top (it’s about to break anyway), dodge the wasps coming to see what you’re about. Decide if you want to take the long dirt driveway, kicking up dust and rocks as you go, or risk startling a few bees in the grass. The wind whips down from the bluff against your neck, keeping the sun’s heat from becoming unbearable. Look around at the old chicken houses, now years out of use and a few strong storms away from scattering in the wind – Dad’s been meaning to go through them for months now, but this weekend there was only time to go over the new routine before you took his place: pills in the morning, pills at lunch, pills in the evening. Hide the bag of prescriptions, because if Grandma finds them, they’ll end up in the trash: “all I’ve ever taken is aspirin, once a day, and I’ve done pretty well so far,” she swears. 

Across the street is the neighbor’s house, high on the hill, with the mountains rising behind – a field of cows separates you, and at this point in the afternoon only the curious members of the herd will wander down to the fence to watch you approach. The rest laze in groups, shoving their black-and-cream-colored bodies into the scarce shade of a few trees. All of them chew in your general direction, regardless of the distance. There are more rules about food: all she’ll ever have for dinner is milk and crackers, so the snacks in the pantry are yours. Get the coffee machine ready at night or she’ll reuse the same grounds every morning. If you can’t get her to eat something else, rest assured she’ll sneak a few ice cream sandwiches from the freezer during the day. The dirt morphs into gravel as you get closer to the road, and if there is anything in the mailbox it’s surely the Yell County Record or junk mail. You have to sort through it down here, though, because there’s a tree that keeps her from seeing you when she stands in the kitchen window – twisted, split down the middle, reaching gnarled fingers into the sky, the so-called “fairy tree” defines the yard as much as she defines the house. It is impossible to imagine them separate; one feels hollowed out without the other. Behind that barrier, you can hide any letters from the doctors or the Hospice people. Keep them in your back pocket, give them to Dad when he’s up this weekend. 

The walk back gives you a clear view of the field rolling out all the way up to the bluff, and sometimes deer eye you suspiciously from way back in the trees. Back inside, she’ll happily accept whatever you bring back, gnarled knuckles reaching out for your hands to receive it. Before the hour is through that question will come around again: “have you checked the mail? I don’t know that I’ve seen her run yet today.” Then watch as she shuffles around, from bedroom to kitchen to the thermostat down the hall. Watch her more closely when she goes outside to “make sure her car is locked” – she swears that it’s “all this sitting around doing nothing” that made her fall in the first place, but notice how she sways when she walks: a little to the left, grabs the counter for balance, back upright, and starts off again. The paper sits on her side table all the while, though trying to make her remember that on her own would be useless. Living in this rhythm without going crazy is an art, especially when you’re the only one who remembers the repeating days. The TV keeps you from being completely cut off from the outside world, but there are hazards there too, especially in a year like this. The headlines run and rerun as often as she thinks to ask about them – “what is that ‘co-vid’ they’re talking about? It sounds pretty bad.” “Is it like the flu?” Yes, but much worse. It’s very bad. We’re okay up here though, since it’s just us. A moment of silence, and then: “has the mail run today?” You know, I haven’t seen her come by yet. Let me go check.

By now it’s easier to slip into that stream of conversation you’ve memorized. Slip on your shoes, half because you don’t want her walking down there by herself, and half out of desperation to get out of the house. Walking away and walking back becomes a breath, a blank space you won’t know you need until you’re out there. You’ve agreed to this journey with her, to take some of the weight off Dad’s shoulders, and all it takes is a bit of habit, a bit of hidden grief that splits you down the middle while you watch her scattering in the wind. Mailbox in the morning. Mailbox at lunch. Mailbox in the evening. Let me go check. 

III. October

It’s hard to describe how a college campus feels with no people in it, but it’s something like setting up an aquarium without water – looks pretty, but it’s still missing the substance that makes it alive. Hollow. Footsteps ring out on empty sidewalks and there is no one around to hear them. The parking is always guaranteed, but the walk across the parking lot is enough to make you feel like you missed the rapture. Last one left in the Garden of Eden. Noah in his arc without the animals. Whatever metaphor you need to use for “left alone during cuffing season, no senior year parties to be had, and in the middle of a pandemic at that.” Worst of all, though, nobody is here to watch the trees put on their show. It’s the centerpiece of the fall semester, and everyone is missing it while they stare at computer screens and dream of move-in day. Violent reds and warm oranges erupt to an audience of none, and that’s to say nothing of the golden yellows and soft browns. The wind makes shapes with them, buffets them through the air for a time before laying them in tall piles that crackle under the slightest pressure. But there is no pressure here, there are no feet to stamp them down into sidewalk mosaics before an army of leaf blowers takes them away.

You do your best. A solitary figure moving across an empty campus, trying to make the buildings and plants feel seen, as though they need a passerby to justify all the commotion. Taking it all in. Making a mess of all the leaf piles because no one else can. Kicking up pecan shells and stepping in puddles just to make an impression. The thudding of your feet is an irregular rhythm as you make turns on a whim, circle back, change your mind for the third time about which path to take. Still, it is a rhythm, and you can’t leave all this silence unanswered. You have to be the water, the animals, that sinless prototype traipsing around the dead body of an empty garden. Who else can say that fall happened – and that it was just as beautiful as ever – if you’re not there to see it? To say it to no one in particular?

To be fair, maybe it’s the other way around. If you can run your hands along familiar brick buildings, hear the crunch of pecans under your shoes, and pluck a stray leaf or two before it falls, who can say that you weren’t here? Your favorite places do not live and die by your watch – still, the dormancy feels permanent the longer it goes on. But the trees will continue to shed the year’s growth regardless of your presence. What if it’s you who will cease to exist among their branches? One step, another, and then a silence as you find yourself hollow, with not-yourself, not anybody filling in the concrete veins between buildings. No footsteps ringing out, no one around to hear them anyway. Bodies disappeared, even their shadows now fleeing behind them. 

IV. January

Never has a parking lot filled me with such equal parts joy and terror, such a potent mix of relief and anxiety. One morning, then all day, the rolling of tires gave way to a parade of footsteps, gathering keys and opening doors and climbing steps. I had to park in the back to leave room for the long-awaited flow of U-Haul trucks and SUV’s, so I meandered my way across the asphalt through the now-overflowing rows, looking for familiar cars layered with parking decals and keeping an eye out for any new ones. I passed parents and friends weighed down with boxes and carts, pushing back against the biting winter wind. I couldn’t decide if it was better or worse than moving in the heat of August, but no one seemed to mind either way – the point was that we were here again, here at all, after a year of empty white lines and locked buildings. I saw the tops of faces and tried to smile with my eyes, although it was mostly a game in reading the eye crinkles and moving eyebrows above masks. For the first time in several months, I swiveled my head around before crossing from one sidewalk to another – now, finally, the threat of a car coming down the road could be realized. I made arcs along the sidewalk as I passed more and more people, the distance expanding and contracting as I tried to give them all the space that I could. I couldn’t decide if I was elated or terrified as dorm entrances swung open and paths warmed with movement and chatter. It felt like I had been the only one awake around here for so long, and now that people were arriving, rubbing the sleep from their eyes and their windows, I had no idea what to do next. Stuck in the not-quite-normal middle of things, it was all I could do to trace sidewalks as they began to breathe again, to let my feet lead me where they always had, to watch the shadows come back with the light as it filled our steps. 

V. March Again

We woke up and found ourselves in heaven. It had to have been an accident, we thought, because it hardly ever snows in central Arkansas, let alone sticks to the ground long enough to be of any use. So, this had to be an alternate reality we had woken into – heaven, the afterlife, a collective manifestation of the liminal space we had been living in for twelve months now. We cannot tell where our feet will land, but we keep stepping anyway. Pure white, with sparkling blue notes, the streets and sidewalks make one brilliant stretch of light in the morning air. It is nearly blinding, diamonds glittering across our vision and crunching beneath our feet. It is a race to see who can make footprints, handprints, any kind of mark in the clean white ground before others arrive. Some spots are already pockmarked with boot-shaped holes, and under bushes are crisscrossing lines of tiny y’s that lead to birds sheltered in the leaves and branches. We get up early, get out while the sun is still shaking off the morning, and find the newly untouched corners of the world. Our legs crust over with packed snow and snaking trails lay behind us for the next person to follow. Fat white flakes must be fairy dust until we pack them solid in our hands. We are high kneeing our way through this place that surely cannot be our college campus; we have hardly been here two months and already it is unrecognizable again. In heaven, you can jump as far and as high as you want, can fling yourself in an arc towards the ground and it will catch you – but it won’t hurt, will only leave the outline of your body in the pillowing banks until those too are refilled with light. We pass buildings that must have been familiar once, and we breathe harder with the effort of movement. It is cold, but not bitter – the kind of crisp cold that you want to drink deeply, fill your lungs with and let out, all used up, in puffs of steam.

The collective movement of blood in a collective movement of bodies melts the paths back into existence. Each time we walk through it, it becomes a little less hallowed, a little closer to Earth, a little more unsettling. We knew it wasn’t normal from the start, but we had suspended our disbelief, buried the anxious feeling under another round of snowfall. Besides, after a year like this, what’s a warning shot from climate change to top it off?  But we cannot help the creeping feeling. At night, the wind walks behind us and freezes the ground solid again. Walking under streetlights, we can feel the ground sharpening beneath us, making fists where once were open palms. After a few nights and mornings of this, dirt and mud darken the stretches of white. Now, we hold our breaths, because every step is the last one before the slip and the fall. Now, we are shuffling our boots across the ground, trying not to slide across hidden ice or slick pavement. The air knifes itself into the pieces of skin we forget to cover. No one flings themselves towards the ground anymore because the ground is trying to fling us down on its own. We are reminded that there are things to be done, that we cannot stay floating in this space forever, that we must make the journey across slush and ice in order to get back to normal. No one mentions the fact that we were not at “normal” to begin with, that perhaps normal never meant anything, or at least it doesn’t anymore. We just start walking again, more carefully, to the places we have to be, letting the water drip off of us, leaving heaven to peel off and melt away.

VI. May

Here is how I imagine it – in pieces, in shapes, in single strokes of color and fabric. My nicest black dress shoes. Clean black pants and a dark collared shirt. A mask, because of course there must be a mask, black and clean as the rest, an entire outfit pressed, ironed, smooth as a bullet in the chamber. The swish, swish of sleeves against a gown, a collection of similar figures making circles, then zigzags, and finally settling into real lines. The lines and cracks in the pavement pass under a swell of shuffling feet – we start moving, and my lungs fill with the air it takes to stay upright, but somehow it feels like I have been holding this breath all morning. We have been waiting here for an hour, but we have been waiting for so much longer, for that signal: something triggers the front of the group and a whole body shivers behind it, a beast of mortarboard and legs that swing en masse, in time, let’s go. 

This walk should be muscle memory (is what I tell myself). Put one foot in front of the other, watch the cars rush beneath me, follow birds through the air or see them take off from their perches as I pass, run my fingers along the fence and take in the imagined feeling that the whole thing is swaying, that I could fall into the street at any moment. This is a motion I know, it is one that has carried me home and away, to class and back, from the very first steps to the very last. This time, though, I am struggling to get the movement of my feet just right. Left. Right. I am watching the person in front of me so that I don’t run into them. Right. Left. I am trying to let myself be carried by this wave of bodies, but I am terrified to stop pushing back because the whole thing might just fall apart. 

I made this walk four years ago and had no idea what I was doing. I try to remember that feeling, but every detail of difference brings me back to these feet, this now declining path towards a sea of cars. I think of all the people who are not here for the second walk, who didn’t stick around or are sticking around a little longer. I was in shorts and sandals then, sweating along with strangers in the August heat, no masks, no way to predict what eight more semesters would do to me and to the world. We are on level ground again, but I am still not surefooted, only buoyed up by the people around me while we look ahead to that target: a doorway that never felt so much like gasping for air.  

Here is how I imagine it – the lines break back into zigzags and then smaller lines, rows of square heads trying to look dignified as they bump into one another. Green turf waves and flattens underneath my feet, and suddenly my own name falls from someone else’s mouth (but I do not hear it, only see a half-face in front of me nod and gesture). I am supposed to be moving. These clean black shoes thunk, thunk, thunk up three steps, and I am up in the air again. I feel whatever heat the damp May weather can muster, but what really makes the sweat bead under my cap is the weight of so many eyes. I am carried by kind looks and outstretched hands (that I cannot shake). I have walked, I have been walking, I am walking up to a piece of paper that is supposed to tell me finally, you are done. But still, I am not breathing yet. There are more steps on the other side, and another to the place where a man with a camera stands ready to shoot, where I can take off my mask and pretend that this is all normal, just like any other year. 

When I imagine it, I feel every piece of clothing, every goosebump, every bit of gravel and grass and the sun against my face, like I will have the time to think of every other step as I take this one. I am swallowed in memory as it collapses and makes all walks into one. All roads lead back here. That bridge was only ever bringing me to this moment, from the very first time I stood at its peak and looked down. I have started making this walk in my mind every day, but I know in reality it will never be like this. The reality: Just a few steps. The ready, aim, fire of bodies and cameras all moving in a single direction. A dark stroke of fabric across a stage. By the time I remember to breathe out, I will already be at home taking my shoes off. 

Spring 2021