Waiting In Line At The Grocery Store
You are waiting in line at the grocery store.
“What is virtue?” You ask the bald-headed monk standing behind you, waiting, just like you, to scan his items.
“To receive whatever enters your life selfishly,” he responds, “and to give it back, whenever it’s time for it to go, selflessly.”
You thank the monk. “Thank you,” you say.
“You’re welcome.” The monk replies.
The scruffy old man in front of you in a stained gray t-shirt and foam flip flops is ready to pay. He slips his credit card into the machine as a teenager bags his items and transfers the bags to the cart. You glance at the items the old man has purchased:
- 4 cans of pinto beans
- 3 Salisbury steak frozen dinners
- 1 gallon of milk
- 9 apples
- a jar of peanut butter
- a box of wheat thins
Not one of his items matches yours. That week you will each eat completely different things. “What a strange world I live in,” you think to yourself. And it’s true. You do live in a strange world.
Echoes of surrounding shoppers speaking and the clattering of carts against concrete floors fills your soundscape and you wonder, “When was the last time I experienced silence? Real, true silence?” When you were little, you and your older brother shared a bedroom. Every night, once your mother had tucked you both into bed and turned out the lights, you would both shout, “Goodnight, sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite everybodyyyy!” And every night, without fail, you and your brother would compete to be the last one to say it. If you said it first, he’d say it second, and you’d say it third, and he’d say it fourth until you were both spouting “goodnightsleeptightdon’tletthebedbugsbiteeverybodyyygoodnightsleeptightdon’t — ” and your mother would shout from her room downstairs “ENOUGH!” And so you would reduce your spells to a whisper which would wind down to nothing but mouthing lips. Individual words were no longer intelligible, but every few seconds you would hear your brother take a deep breath and know that on his side of the room, beyond the pitch black darkness which separated you and him, he was secretly insuring himself from defeat. And so you would wait as long as you could bear. You would make your breaths light and shallow. You wouldn’t move a muscle. You wanted him to think you were asleep. An itch would ignite on your head. It felt like its own tiny voice, demanding to be heard. You would close your eyes as tight as they would go until it faded away. It helped you learn a valuable lesson: If you wait long enough, even the itchiest itches will go away. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, you would strain your ears and listen as intently as you could. It felt like you were expanding a part of yourself outwards into the darkness, like some kind of smoke spreading across the room. You’d stretch and stretch that smoke until it seemed like it was at its utmost limit and then you would stretch it some more and some more until at last you reached your brother’s bed. You floated above his still body and for a moment, an infinite, tense eternity, you would hear absolute silence. The world was completely empty. There was no future or past, no heartbreak or romance, no money or poverty, no regret or pride, no death or life, there was only listening as hard as you could to hear the sound of your brother’s heartbeat. And when that moment had passed, when you had confirmed what you had waited to confirm, your body would, at last, relax, and you would mouth as silently as the wind is pushed by a butterfly’s wings, “Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite everybody.” And the darkness of sleep would overtake you like a curtain dropping on a stage.
“That’ll be $74.98, sir.” The cashier tells you for (judging by the tone of his voice) not the first time. You turn abruptly to the monk who is patiently standing behind you, looking over a magazine on a rack entitled “CATS: DO THEY REALLY LOVE US?”
“My brother died five years ago.” You tell him. He turns and gives you a look of confused compassion. “What am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed to let that go? He was my brother, you understand? He wasn’t some fucking…” you struggle to spin an example, “broken tea cup that I liked or whatever the fuck you’re attached to, he was my brother, he was mine. Fuck you.” You ask. “I’m sorry.” You apologize.
You spoke loudly and the store pauses to listen. The carts no longer clatter. The scanners no longer beep. The customers no longer chatter. Where did all of that sound go? The store, which is so big, could barely contain it all just a few seconds before. What would all of that empty space hold now? Isn’t nothing a kind of something? Doesn’t it have its own weight? Even if you screamed at the top of your lungs you would never be able to match the magnitude of the sound which had, all of a sudden and without warning, stopped to hear you speak.
What would you say next? How would you make it out of this grocery store? And then you heard it: that silence. It was as if every object, every person, every thought, every emotion had gone mute. There was nothing. And you were no one. The smoke of your spirit burst beyond your body and engulfed the earth in a fraction of a millisecond. You heard the milky way, each star sparkled inside of you. You expanded beyond the furthest galaxy known to science and kept going. You expanded all the way to the end of time and met the beginning of the universe and went beyond that too. And then you stopped, all at once, and listened.
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You looked around at the gawking customers. Each one had their own life, their own problems, their own hopes and dreams. They were waiting for you to say something. You turned to the young bag boy and took the last bag from his frozen hands and placed it gently into your cart. You turned to the crowd and smiled, not to them but to yourself. The smile was entirely self-contained and personal, like scribbling a diary entry and burning the pages.
“Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite everybody!” You shouted and pushed your cart out of the grocery store and into the strange, infinite world which laid beyond it.