Day 59: When I Opened the Door, There Were Trees
Day 59: May 24, 2020
Global cases: 5,494,945; Deaths: 346,434
Egypt cases: 17,265; Deaths: 764
Melanie Carter
Senior Instructor
Rhetoric and Composition Department
It is 2:07 on a Saturday morning. I am counting my breaths on a mat in the dark.
Twenty minutes. Forty. At 2:57 I open my eyes. I think, In three minutes it will be three. And from an afternoon in India four years earlier, a woman answers: This is the hour of the bees…
What is time when everything is at a standstill? How do I write of place when beside me there are suitcases, two, their tops thrown back?
I have packed this time much as I did in 2015, when I left AUC for a year, and then a year… picking things up, putting them down: this book, that scarf, these notes bound with a staple and pencil marked. What do I love? I ask, what can I live without?
The car arrives. I have summer clothes. Winter clothes. A carry-on bag with a laptop that I will pull out, mid-flight, to read essays written at the end of spring. They are driven, all of them, by constant questions: What do I say? How do I say…?
Be honest with your reader.
In the ride to the airport, I breathe through a mask a friend has brought to me the night before. It is black and covered with small white snowflakes. I wonder where we are. The Ring Road, the curfew lifted, is almost empty. Is this Ramadan? Is this quarantine?
Is this security, at the airport? These blue circles we are standing on? These little islands…
Later, in my seat, I watch people as they board the plane: A mask. A mask. A man and his mother enter my row. Their faces are covered with plastic shields held in place by plastic halos. They pull from bags with a pharmacy logo sanitizer for their hands, packets of tissues, spray bottles filled with alcohol. Everyone is cleaning: armrests, tray tables, the tiny buttons on the remote control beneath the seatback screens.
I close my eyes. The plane takes off. It is 11:22, 1:15, well past 3… and all of it the single humming hour that stretches between wherever we are and the door we entered, one by one, with our boarding cards. Our numbers.
The man beside me sleeps on his mother’s shoulder. Later she will sleep leaning on his.
The world shrinks to what I can see.
For The Caravan‘s previous diary entries in Arabic and English go to our COVID-19 Special Coverage page.
Through the space between the seats in front of me, a woman is taking selfies. Mask off. Mask on. Mask off. Mask off.
What is the truth?
In the days before, I hear “The numbers are going down, but slowly.” I hear “A plane is the safest place to be.” I hear, from the Rose Garden: “There will be a vaccine for everyone, all over the world, by the end of the year.”
Be honest with your reader.
The lights come down. Blinds come down. And when I close my eyes in the artificial dark, I am standing outside a hut in the pre-dawn cold of a January morning. There is the chime of milk pails, the sound of chanting.
Once, when I was away and then away, I walked each day on a gravel road that ran through pastures lined with trees. And every morning there was a point I reached when I was so tired, so far from home, that the thought of turning around seemed almost impossible.
Is there a place where far isn’t far enough?
A cart rolls close. The woman whose son is sleeping folds down his tray. Taps him on the arm. Looks. Puts it up again.
Everything is delivered in large blue trays with fold-down lids. I wonder at the design: all this plastic. All this surface area. I think of the stories that say the sky is bluer because planes aren’t flying. I think of a documentary from the week before that claims all our ills can be traced to our separation from the earth. And the solution—the revolution—will come from taking off our shoes and putting our bare, human feet on bare, uncovered ground again.
What is the truth?
The plane touched down.
And after, after customs, security, after the gasp of electric doors pulled wide open, there was the sky to answer the sky that is now a world away.
What can you say honestly?
That at night, in the dark, the car radio buzzed with voices.
When I opened the door the following morning, there were trees. A walk. Sun.
