Where the World Ends

Words & photos by Christopher Nelson | May 2020

The world ends at the edges of my front window because it has to, because if it doesn’t, I oppose everything she is working toward. Three mornings each week I stand in our street-level living room and watch as my partner walks to our truck in her nurse scrubs and leaves for a 12-hour shift at the hospital. Some mornings after I watch her go, I do nothing but sit behind the glass and slowly drink my coffee and stare out at the street.

All day people in masks walk by our house, and all day they stop to gawk at Luci, our adorable 16-pound tabby cat who lives in a suction-cup hammock that hangs in the front window. She woos with dreamy smiles and bulbous contortions, and disgusts when she pushes her hind paws against the window and splays spread eagle, licking clean her hairless panniculus that hangs low like udders.

I forget that people fawn over my fat cat, and soon I realize that they’re no longer looking at her but at me, like our living room is a bohemian diorama and in it stands a tall, bony man in too-short jean shorts, waving like he is on a parade float, obviously stoned at 8 a.m. and two bites into a white-bread turkey sandwich.

Some days I watch her leave and immediately feel trapped, like the world outside very well might be only as big as our front window, and on those days I indulge fain desires to return to some sort of normalcy by throwing a leg over one of my motorcycles, because since before coronavirus came to California, riding a motorcycle has been the best way to enjoy an adventure while maintaining social distance.

The morning after the state issued its stay-at-home orders, I rode up Angeles Crest Highway on my Sportster chopper, and it was one of the best rides of my life, because I was all but alone on the idyllic mountain road, and the freeways to and from were empty, too, and the bike performed wonderfully. Two weeks later I rode back to Angeles Crest, but by then the gas station at the mouth of the road was overcrowded by humans with exposed smiles, and the road was rife with squids and pricks, and I haven’t gone back since.

Some days I wilt by the glow of the television and order fried foods and destroy myself wondering what comes after this, if this world is worth the effort. I think about the righteously airheaded, the selfish, and the dicks, all of whom ignore self-distancing guidelines because they can’t be inconvenienced, and I think of the opportunistic, the idiotic, and the privileged, all of whom use a matter of global health as a means to protest the pansy-ass civil liberty impingements made by a depressingly inept White House.

I feel hopeful again when I look through the front window and see craft-paper signs hung from the neighboring houses: “I stay home for those who cannot,” and I think of her and count the hours until she comes home.

Some days I bask in this macabre opportunity for personal reflection and creation, now given the chance to do everything I said I would do if I only had the time to do it. I started drawing, every day, and discovered that I really enjoy abstract portraiture. The process of drawing is meditative, and because of that I am a happier person, and I like what I’ve drawn so much that I printed a few of my odd, colorful characters as stickers, which I now slap on street signs when I take our new puppy for walks.

Blue is a 12-week-old runt of the litter that came to us from a town on the U.S.-Mexico border after we decided that there is no better time to transition to life with a puppy than when you’re quarantined during a pandemic. “Blue” because he has a blue tongue, so we think he’s part Chow-Chow, but his face is retriever, his sausage legs are Basset, his tail is salamander, and his fur is rat, and he is so squat that he can comfortably sit beneath the bottom frame rails of my Sportster. Loveable freaks, the both of them.

The more I do to forget about normal—to enjoy this moment and appreciate the world that ends at the edges of my window—the less I want for the world we left behind. I sit in awe of how calm my life feels at this time, and I sit in horror when I think of how many people had to die to slow the pace of life to something more sensible, even if it may be fleeting. I hope it isn’t, because there is nowhere to go, and everyone to see, and nothing going on, so there is no excuse not to stay home, slow down, teach ourselves, write letters, shift our perspectives, realign our priorities, and accept that normal is a perversion of our expectations, and that what we knew as normal is dead, and that death is dispassionate, and that the world is small, and that we are not as free or as in control as we like to believe we are.

Every night at exactly 8 p.m., the people on our block begin to cheer and whistle and bang cooking pans as a “thank you” to healthcare workers. The love of my life, Mallory, arrives home soon after, and the animals and I line up in our front window, and we jump and whine as she comes up the front stairs. It never matters what sort of day I had, because she’s home, and it doesn’t matter that the world ends at the edges of my front window, but she loves being stuck inside with me and our freak-show pets.