Of Gardens & Glances

One of my favorite lyrics is from a Nick Cave song, Far From Me: 

“Then the sun would leave your pretty face. And you’d retreat from the front of your eyes.” 

The rest of song is lovely but kinda bleak. This line though, what a magic little moment it creates. I love watching people when they’ve retreated like that, turned inward, when they’re thinking about something or watching someone or something else. You’re so vulnerable and human when you’re doing that. We’ve all got our secret gardens we retreat to. Spying on people when they’re in there makes me feel more connected to humanity. What creep, eh? 

In lockdown, the sun left all our pretty faces, and we had to retreat from the front of our lives. Back here floating in the deep space of our solitude, I did not get to engage in my habit of audience watching (an important subset of people watching). No rock shows spent peeking at people transported on an elixir of riffs and stage lighting. No movies to glance over my shoulder and see faces awash in the endorphin glow of Hollywood cheese. 

I did get to peek into people’s windows at night, out in the wet cold, as I beat the streets of the blocks around my home “for the dog” (for me).

I also spied on my kind husband as we watched our nightly comedic episodes. If I look over and he’s smiling at joke, all cute and vulnerably boyish, it gives me a jolt of raw joy. Off topic, but one grim night of lockdown when we were stumped to find any cotton-candy content to send us off to a happy sleep — t’was a season of drowning in the churn of the news cycle and we’d long since finished every last good episode of every good show — Mark thought back a few weeks and wistfully stated, “Ted Lasso was the best thing we had going for us.” In the universe of that 2020 moment, it was True.