Tom Treanor
Green Light Go
Try counting your walls. Have you done this before? Done easy if you’re inside a box. Those simple play shapes, primary school scissor paper, taken to a geometry book with strange modular dolls that fold into white angles. Take note of a floor and a ceiling too, do these count? They bump the numbers. Your box is a sequence of rooms shaped like letters. How many walls make a house? Depends on the house. Depends on the walls: floor-to-ceiling, not-quite-to-ceiling, pony walls, bar counters. Does the space between doors count as a wall? A wall is a wall where something is hanged. Paintings, trinkets, an evil eye from some long-ago vacation over an ocean, a space with a socket to grant yourself power. If you count doors, do you count doorframes? Passthroughs to new rooms, new walls: new caveats. You’re not even at windows yet. A window is a wall all by itself. That’s a riddle, something to ask a caterpillar.
Rain hits windows from the west. Days bleed gray from morning to dark. No sun up, no sun down, just daylight and not-day. When the rain comes it hits hard, a heartbeat, beating the windows and seeding through the screens. Sunny days are fewer in spring, but that’s not what we tell people. Others think it’s tulips and popcorn blossoms in the trees, park loungers on picnic blankets, dappled light in a storybook sky. We have the tulips, the popcorn, but the blossoms have shaken to the ground shower after shower. The sky? It’s still just gray.
Out of doors are the birds, the sirens, more grayness without noise. At sundown, at the dimming light of not-day, come the bells, the dogs, the clap clap clap of a captive audience.
Windows on the walls is where there’s the light. There’s more inside, though, shining whitely from slim silver clamshells on our desks and slick brick devices meant for our pockets. This light is a kind of clear-bright, colorless yet kaleidoscope, a sterile flicker wakening the room. All these new windows looking in on us with faces from other living rooms and bedrooms and kitchens, nooks and closets, all of us tilted by greenlit webcams. We spend time looking up into our noses instead of our eyes.
“Hi!” we wave.
It feels like we’re talking between plate glass. Every day we stare at screens. That’s where we are, that’s what we do. We see each other in appointments, on timetables.
Days are all the same. It’s a rhythm, a loop, a routine if you can call it that, but stuck in a small small space with only so many steps to shuffle. You make choices: soft clothes, a robe, whatever is on the floor when you roll out of bed. Maybe today’s the day you pretend again and put on a pressed white shirt. Shined shoes. Coat out of the closet of coats, grab your bag, grab your keys, you’re ready to go. Ready to your kitchen, your device: you open the thing, you put on the kettle. There’s a calendar, it’s work. We stare at screens. Appointments. Timetables.
“Hi,” we wave. We watch as we sip coffee.
There aren’t bars to go to so the bars have come to us. By necessity. Bottles in the fridge, boxes above the fridge, cases and cans parked by the fridge. Wine from a bladder. Easier this way, indulging one, just one more. Do you meet new people in the green-light-go of your device? If not out there, why not in here? The people you know ask “How are you?!” You tell them weekdays don’t matter anymore: remember them? The Sunday night anxiety to the hump day relief. TGIThursday, Fridays hungover. People ask if you’re doing okay. Sure, you tell them, because there’s not much else to say. Are we all becoming more boring? Boredom begets boring, you’re stuck back in your rhythm loop routine if you can call it that. It’s wine night, you tell them, webcam-bombing a weeknight.
There was a day with sunlight, and bobbing against the screen of the window was a bee, a giant bee, a terrifying thing, all stingers and legs. It tapped and wove and sang through its wings in the sunflower light. Your first visitor in what feels like, what is, weeks. It’s trying to gain entry, you can hear it tapping its way closer. You shut the window.
You’re told humans are social animals, they touch, they feel. All of that is gone now, at least for now. Your social touch feel options are plate glass or nothing. It’s rare to converse with someone real time in the flesh and it’s always someone you don’t know. Face-to-face becomes mask-to-mask, fogged eyeglasses, the vacuum rhythm of speaking behind paper. Grocery checkers are friendlier now, they bid you good health and you do the same. You want to be thankful but not too thankful, it’s so easy to tip into patronizing without meaning it, and then you’ve lost the goodwill you gained for the one person you’ve spoken to in the real world in days. Remember what it feels like just to touch an arm? Hugs, bygone.
Wine night webcam bomb and “Hi!” is about all I can remember. Because I’d like to see your face, or whatever, I say, probably because I was in love with you once and there’s that tiny hot knife of me that always will be. Did I say that? Did I slip? Try counting your walls. Cheersing a wine glass to a webcam, giggling like what was said doesn’t matter, we just say hi and we wave and then we’ll text each other on our devices again some other day. In the waning time left with no pixelated picture, I have just a moment glimpsed through the fog to all the things I said: we know that all of it was true. Every word.