Earthquake

 ‘What the…,’ I shouted over the thunderous vibrations, watching the cat’s tail disappear into the shed, my neighbour flying out his door, pulling at his dressing gown belt, a girl behind him, peeping over the threshold in a flash of bare white.  I soon find out we’d experienced an earthquake.  Forth FM reported it, telling us that at approximately 11:00 hours, an earthquake of 2.5 on the Richter scale shook Midlothian, and in particular Penicuik.  My quaint Scottish town.  As if that wasn’t enough, the next day, a guy and his gas detector lurked around my airbricks checking for leaky pipes.  ‘Carry on, don’t mind me,’ I said and after a thorough examination he told me I didn’t need to camp out in the shed with the cat, I could enter the house, no leaks, merely the visitation of a gregarious gas cloud.  All I need now is a Monarch butterfly migration, or some shooting stars, or a steam eruption, or a white rainbow.

Is this the result of global warming?  Like the floods, winds, dire weather changes, filtered through the news, in buzz words, greenhouse gases, climate change.  It has to be, no?  What else can it be?  I look to stories I’ve heard in my past, and I perceive some likenesses.  The parting of the Red Sea for instance, could this have been an ocean bed earthquake?  And Noah’s Ark, I mean, it’s scarily apt right now.  Could this be a premonition as well as a biblical event?  A time-travelling flood.  Humans rather than animals piling in, and not in twos, with no social distancing evident.  I look around me, there are many hills, Arthur’s Seat far in the distance.  I’m level with the top of this hill of volcanic proportions, 800 feet above sea level, so I’m hoping when the rains eventually fall an Ark will not be necessary to float me to a new destiny.    

An eclipse would excite.  Switch me off and then switch me on again, to a different me.  It’s not that I’m fed up with me, it’s more like the me, inside of me, is shrinking, plummeting to my achy metatarsals, my fallen arches.  I need restored, my battery rendered, refilled, rejuvenated.  I need a kick up the arse, a talking to, a jolt, a thump, I need to obscure this insidious languishing.

A year and a half of listening to facts and figures on the TV, hearing harrowing stories, living harrowing stories, locked down, isolated, distanced from those we love, worrying about those we love, nothing to do but care.  No mixing, no matching, no hugs, no kisses, no warmth, and from down in my gullet, no laughter lathers.  I’m out of laughter, of partying practice. 

Happiness is an art form.  A form of art.  A How to be Happy shape.  A smile, a crinkle around the eyes, twinkling, laughter, liveliness.  It comes easy to some.  Or does it.  Some merely suggest happiness.  Pretence comes easy to some.  The actor, the secretive, the diplomat, the independent, the child.  Ah yes, the pretence of a child.  This brings happiness.  How wonderful is the sight of a child running free in the wind, simulating a bird, a plane, no superman? 

We could all learn from a child, if only we would open our eyes and see that a child’s innocence and happiness can be ours.  If only we would rekindle our immaturity.  Easy for some, for those of us who have never grown out of it.  For others, there is too much baggage cluttering the hallway, no space to angle around it, to let the sun in, to feel the breeze, to allow the heart to beat lightly. 

But how do we break the sitting at home alone cycle, now that the world is slowly opening up to us again.  Friends and family call to meet you, to go here, go there, but you’ve forgotten how.  Your body is numb, your heart is slow, you are weary, stiff, after a long hibernation.  The gaping cavern is familiar, it is home and the big world, absent for so long, makes you wobbly about treading there again.  A baby comforted and coddled, too warm to move from the mother’s breast.     

I can only hope I still harbour my child-self, that she jiggles inside, embracing the new world, the new experiences, as she looks into the gulley of veins and tendons, searching for the earthquake epicentre, the cause, the effect.  A gas cloud?