BY FEATURED WRITER: MEGAN STIELSTRA

Megan Stielstra, 11:00, 2020, digital photograph. Courtesy of the author. — Megan Stielstra, *11:00,* 2020, digital photograph. Courtesy of the author.

5:45

MEGAN STIELSTRA / OCT 2020 / ISSUE 2

The lockdown started eight months ago but a hundred years have passed since then or maybe just snap your fingers. I’m forty-five years old in my mother’s basement in Michigan and thirty-three years old giving birth in a blizzard in Chicago and thirty-one years old getting married on a beach at sunset and twenty-eight years old falling in love and twenty-two years old falling in love and twenty and nineteen and eighteen in love and at seventeen I am leaving this basement, the world is at my feet, a red carpet spread out before me and I believe in only two things: writing and love but snap your fingers I’m back here again and I only believe in one anymore. My son comes down the stairs and says, “Mom, it’s time.” He is twelve and taller than me and he is twelve in school on a computer and he is twelve with allergies that terrify—virus or sniffles?—and he is twelve with allergies that are no big deal because we live in Chicago in asphalt instead of grass and he is twelve when we arrive at his grandmother’s, “just for a little while,” I tell him, “just long enough for me to figure this out,” even though I figured it out at forty-four and twenty-eight and seventeen and what the fuck is time?

We put on shoes and masks, out the back door and across the yard towards the fence between us and the tracks. He’s been upstairs in school and I’ve been downstairs at work, our eyes both fuzzy from so much screen. Every day is a thousand things to talk about: a pandemic, an election, a racial uprising centuries in the making, what is happening to our family and when do we go back to Chicago and how do you find the square root of a trinomial and our immediate story problem: If the train arrives in Ann Arbor at 6:06pm and grandma’s house is 8 miles from the station at what time does the train pass us by? I’m forty-five years old jumping a fence with my son and fourteen years old jumping a fence to sit on the tracks and listen to the Pump Up the Volume soundtrack on my Walkman on repeat and sixteen years old jumping a fence to make out with my boyfriend in a field of fireflies and sixteen years old crying after those frat boys found me swimming naked in the quarry and sixteen years old screaming my beautiful fucking teenage girl-rage safe under the sound of the train blurring by snap your fingers I’m thirty-three driving from Chicago crying with my son in his car seat snap your fingers forty-five driving from Chicago crying with my son playing a video game snap your fingers I leave him with his grandmother and walk straight out the back door, across the yard and over the fence—my body remembers this walk, this sky, this release—and when the train finally comes I scream and scream because what else do you do with everything inside you?

“Mom. Can you feel it?”

I can. I feel everything. Vibrations at first, then almost earthquake; up from the ground and into my shoes. It’s coming, just around the corner past those trees. Can you hear it?—Louder. Louder. Rocks are spilling, branches break, the earth is screaming and what a woman doesn’t say could explode the whole sky. I’m close enough to reach out and lose an arm—one car passes, two, three, four. I lean into the force of it, pushing towards the wake of the wind—ten cars, twenty, forty—and we take off our masks and scream under the sound. My son is twelve and taller than me and he is twelve and laughing at how ridiculous we are and he is twelve and screaming at everything he doesn’t understand. Someday he’ll ask me about this time in our lives and snap your fingers maybe by then he’ll want my words, but for now I am forty-five years old and trying to make it okay. I am forty-five years old making room in my body for other things. I am forty-five years old on a mountain in Moab and forty-five in the desert at Red Rock and forty-five in an outdoor bar in Las Vegas which sure ain’t love but it sure is fun and forty-five with my friends and our children in the ocean in California thinking, love was here all along.

It’s okay to still believe.

Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections, most recently The Wrong Way To Save Your Life, winner of the 2017 Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Longreads, Tin House, and on National Public Radio. She is a 2020 Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas and a 2021 Civic Media Fellow with the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC.