She was raised elsewhere, where the smell of cow would linger over your skin until you crested the northern spine of hills and let the fresh wooded wind rip the farm from you. You could not feel the world in which you lived until you came into another.
But that was a different place and hers is a different time, one in which the quaint nostalgia of a quieter world has been more insistently stripped from the 21st century. Two parents buried in that unyielding earth and a brother packed and gone years before beat the finality of a hard punctuation. Amanda’s childhood belongs to a girl who never knew any age.
The woman knows that cold concrete will leach the heat out of anything that comes to rest on it, and weekends in the city are the only repose a working editor will find. It has been since summer that Amanda could warm in the sun without the energy being pulled out of her feet into thankless sidewalks; there is no urban satisfaction; deep Appalacian mines of willing bodies keep block after block of lights on.
Having known the pliable, firm, uneven character of the natural order, Amanda recognizes the synthetic veneer of everything modernity markets to its hungry flock. The smooth and welcoming surface of things soothes for a time before someone who knows better begins to itch against the immateriality of life removed from life, the phantom stem uprooted. The realization takes time as youthful infatuation with the convenient and the new fade. Too often, youth refuses to leave elderly fools. Few realize what Amanda cannot help but feel. She senses the absence of real life.
It has been 11 days since she touched another person. 11 days. The Wednesday before last. She got drinks with an old friend after work, a rare feat of scheduling, and hugged her goodbye. Before that she is sure that she must have touched other people, but not for the past 11 days.
Amanda craves nothing sensual, but merely the intimacy of knowing a person well enough to break that barrier. Apps and blind dates are not the answer. She just needs a person friendly enough to show that they are pleased to see her. Someone who is not afraid to communicate with a touch of the hand what needs not be said. Maybe a rest of a head on her shoulder. Or a full-on bear hug. Something. Someone.
Compelled out of the sterility of her office and apartment, Amanda is reflecting on her crowded seclusion again as she bundles herself against the chilled wind. When she walks past a favorite park, she realizes that she has not ventured into any park in a while. Not even for a run. And when she jogs through the park, Amanda hardly does more than focus on her breaths and stride and whatever is echoing in her skull at the moment.
It has been 11 days since she touched another person, but now that she dwells on it, Amanda realizes that it has probably been 11 months since she touched anything natural. Farmers’ market fruits and vegetables aside, the produce of growing things notwithstanding, she has kept herself from life, limited to modern necessities: phones, keyboards, handrails, desktops, bartops, clothes, bedclothes, soap, toothbrush, etc: nothing living or life-giving. She does not keep a cat. She gave up caring for houseplants. Her world is entirely barren.
Without much hesitation, Amanda turns into the park, opens her nostrils wide, and breathes deeply the wind blowing into her face, laden uncharacteristically in this city with a must of earth and natural decay. Heading straight toward what she assumes to be the very center of the grounds, Amanda keeps a wide gaze, shifting her head back and forth up and down sparingly, instead allowing her eyes to take in the general encroachment of bare branches, yellowed grass, and grey skies. She lets her hands down, brushing them past the scratching undergrowth.
When Amanda senses herself as surrounded by life as she can be in this once seemingly vibrant city, she drops to her knees and keeps her hands low. She drags her fingers through the patchy grass and skims over the near-frozen dirt. Without regard for what will get stuck under her manicured nails, she pushes against the surface of the ground to get two small handfuls of the dust.
Knees soiled, hands dirtied, Amanda remembers the land of her nigh-forgotten girlhood. She remembers the leaves falling and crumbling in the small crevices they find. She remembers another year’s brittle cow pie scattered by an errant step. She remembers the mushrooms sprouting out of the uncut grass, wet with morning dew. She remembers the cycles of life and the cycles of death and the life of the dirt. She remembers where her parents lay and where one day she too will rest.
Amanda remains on her knees as memories overflow her vulnerability. In her broken return to life, real life, Amanda cannot refrain from releasing some tears off her cheeks onto the ground in front of her. The drops make small pellets of mud in the dry dirt. So she leaves a little of what she has taken where it was bound to return. So she sees what modern life refuses to acknowledge. Today, she sees it.