Dead reckoning

ANXIETY is the siren wail that pounces in the middle of the day, with another spiraling in the void opened by the emptied highway, followed by another and another.

It is a photograph of a shop posted by an entrepreneur that is moving out and returning to where he started: home. 

Anxiety is writing a tribute for someone loved and writing another for a different beloved before the week is over. It is waking at the dead of the night and listening:  who is next?

We clutch at the no small comfort that no loved one has died from the virus. Until we realize that grief is dredging up memories of a certain vintage. 

We have not seen last year/lost year all those who took departure. We thought love was best measured out by the restraint of physical presence and the chance of contagion. 

What is this remorse then for emotions unconfessed, stories hoarded and never to be unspooled? Regret is colder than the touch of fear accompanying the solitary flipping through a scrapbook labeled “The Last Time They Met”.

After the re-imposition of modified enhanced community quarantine, I wake just before midnight, intending to bring inside our ten-month-old calico for a meal before she begins the 12-hour fast and quarantine before spaying.

Wiggy is not with her four kittens, powerful engines idling in those tiny abdomens falling and rising in dreamless sleep. Her orbs are not among the marbles reflecting the moonlight in the faces of her three younger half-sisters from the same mother.

When I hear the mewling of kittens that announces her return, I had time to ponder how inventions like curfew and quarantine are redefined by a creature that makes no sense of these. 

The risk of aspirating—vomit during surgery entering the lungs—requires the caging of a cat to ensure her stomach is empty when anesthesia relaxes the epiglottis that prevents regurgitation.

Wiggy, who since birth comes and goes like the wind, enters the carrier not because she comprehends this long-winded explanation. She trusts me. 

We look at each other across the mesh barrier. I find it difficult to breathe and take her out. I watch her curl up and sleep outside the fetters of my anxiety. Still sleepless hours later, I put her in when there is no more excuse to put off what must be done.

Before modern navigation, a person out at sea estimated distance from the nearest land by dead reckoning. Adrift from the known and familiar, fishermen and sailors read celestial objects or based their estimates on an object known as a Dutchman’s log. To enable one to guess the speed of the vessel, the object had to stay afloat. 

Buoyancy is the trust of a creature that belongs to me and I, to her.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 8, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”