Two days before the recent full moon I stepped out for a walk on wobbly knees. I’d been sick. I suspect it’s been COVID although all my home tests came out negative. It was a brutal fever that wouldn’t yield to my trusted homemade fever tonics and teas alone. When I stepped outside the apartment building, I looked up at the night sky and turning a little, spotted the moon behind thick layers of shifting clouds. I stopped and watched the ball of reflected sunlight, wondering how many lovers it had had. My eyes must be in their rainy season because everything makes them wet these days.
On the second day of a new residency––my work is a series of residencies at different elementary schools across NYC––I walked by a body on a stretcher, draped in white sheet, being carried to an ambulance. The sidewalk had been closed at the construction site where all this was happening. I heard someone say a man had died. And as I followed the direction of a woman in a hard hat to cross the street to the other side, I wondered who the person on the stretcher was. Who had they been living as? Mostly stingy? A-yes-sayer? Foul-mouthed? Did the person mean anything to the still breathing? A son? Brother? Husband? Baby-daddy? Bestest buddy in the world? Did they pack lunch for work like I had done? If so did it cross their mind that they would be out of this world before 9 AM on that Tuesday? Did they have somebody waiting for them at home? A boyfriend? An elderly parent? Had the person, now lifeless, been thinking of the approaching holidays? Were they going to go somewhere? Get noodles in Chinatown? Spend a week in Jamaica? When they left for work, did it cross their mind that they would never return home again? Did they make their bed for the last time? Sit down to a good breakfast? Savored a terrible cup of coffee? Were they a lover of the moon? A one whose eyes got glassy at the sight of the moon? If they knew it was their last hours how would they have spent them? If they knew they would have died at work that day would they have called out sick? Had they been thinking of calling out sick anyway but came to work because a man must tough it out?
How will I go? Will I lie on a stretcher while others carried on to work around me, caring little for my situation and feeling annoyed about the inconveniences of a closed sidewalk?
Is time really Money? Opportunity?
How many have loved the moon but no longer have eyes to gaze upon her? How many have left home for work then just stepped out of the body never to return again? Am I ready to walk out of the body and no longer tear up beneath the waxing and waning moon? What does it mean to be ready to die? Shouldn’t one be ready to die every day? What would that look like: being ready to die every day?
Friend, under the sheet, who were you?
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J. Odartey
