A Certain Sickness

You feel that a certain sickness has been pervading your life. It's a dull ache that suffuses subtly through many unrelated things, a background radiation to your everyday. You have tried removing possible sources, one by one, but in the wake of each, there is less to distract you, and the sickness only changes its form.

One day, you are walking back from your lunch and you cast your eyes on the ground. Even amid the concrete, asphalt, and stones stretching on forever, there is life. Shoots of green dart out from cracks. In a few patches the architects have left open, small trees. Further down your walk, someone has kept a small patch of woodchips and soil, holding a collection of flowers and bushes. Even the loose clippings and leaves on the concrete have a depth to them.

You feel the acceleration of the earth below you, its wide surface supporting you, its pull keeping you from falling into space forever. You note that you haven't thought of the sickness in several minutes.

Late that evening, as you take out the recycling, you hear birds. Their calls trace out the space around you — the city filtering and reverberating the calls more or less, and in different ways, depending on distance and location. You hear them (for once) without the filter of your thoughts overlaid. Their calls do not mean anything in particular, at least to you, and for that, you are grateful.

As your eyes pass over a patch of ground you see every day on returning home, you feel less real for a moment, but the patch is realer than it's been before. There are many others almost (but not quite) like it, and although your view is obstructed, you can sense them faintly beyond it.

On hearing the crickets in the distance, you decide to linger a moment longer. One sound is a continuous wave of trilling, many voices blending into one. In front of that (you can feel the depth of sound now), individual scratches are much clearer, less blurred by the air between you.

You recall that air functions roughly as a low-pass filter. You are at the bottom of a great ocean. It's really not that different from an ocean made of water, is it?

The waters pulsate around you. It feels peaceful though.

You continue back indoors.

Postscript

This was written for the September 2025 IndieWeb blog carnival. Sophia is hosting this month, and the theme is “second-person birds.” On her blog to ground, she writes about nature in the second person.