Stillness on Sunday

Being stuck in my apartment day after day is taking a toll on my spirit. Just out my kitchen window, over the tops of the neighboring apartment buildings, I can see Manhattan. There is a stirring within. I miss Chinatown so deeply. Staring out the window, I close my eyes, remembering…

The park would be full today. The trees would be blooming. It would be shady and cool, a tiny wonderland tucked away among the blocks of soaring buildings. It would be crowded. I would be blissfully close to strangers. The elders would be playing mahjong. I can hear their conversational Mandarin. And someone playing Erhu. The unmistakable sounds of Chinatown on Sunday afternoon. The thought of hopping the train, finding a bench and getting lost there for the day, brings tears to my eyes. Because I know that I can’t. No one can. Not right now. Not with COVID-19.

Pacing, I find myself in my daughter’s room. Usually I’m in and out, but not today. Instead, I’m looking around. At everything. At anything. Just trying to find something to ground me in all of this, because I’m starting to slip away. She is sitting at her little bamboo desk, with her watercolors and her music. And her Chinese scroll above her desk. The one that she got at a clearance sale in Chinatown. (Damn these tears!) I sit on her bed and take it all in. There with all of her plants, she is perfectly content.

I confess how I’m feeling. That I’m going crazy! That I just want to go to Chinatown! (It doesn’t help that her view of the city is even better than mine from the kitchen, so the object of my desire appears even closer, but still just out of reach.) Writing is my home. That is no secret. But all of this staying at ‘home’ is suffocating me right now! I need people and places, sounds and smells. I need inspiration. I need adventure!

She has her back to me. But she’s listening. Barely. Lost in her watercolor world, she responds just enough to keep from losing me altogether. I’m not getting any traction. And that diffuses me. So I tune into her contentment. That’s when I see them. Her tiny little paintings. She has stuck them all over her walls.

They are incredibly lovely, transporting even. There is just something so pure about them. So I stop talking and get lost in them for a moment. Each one seems to have a one word message for me. And within that one word is a deep well of timeless truth, where my very essence is revealed to me through the mirror image of humanity, through my daughter.

I make my way back to myself…

Sometimes everything you need isn’t really out there. It’s just down the hall, in your teenage daughter’s room, with her indie music, her plants, her watercolors, her precious little paintings, her Chinese scroll that she got in Chinatown on clearance, and her not listening. Because it takes you to a place you might not ever have reached otherwise…