My husband is late. Again. And a thought creeps in, uninvited: I hope everything’s okay.

Of course, why wouldn’t that be the case? Really, me waiting for him, already here at home, might be more a statement about my personality than the situation. I’m punctual to a fault. Punctual enough to be uncool, annoying, having spent a lifetime trying to tamp down this behavior. Attempting to stall en route to meetings and lunch appointments, only to find myself arriving precisely on time, waiting for others to show up.

Though, as minutes tick by, still with no sign of my husband, and no clearly identifiable reason for his late—and growing increasingly later—arrival, that voice keeps yammering: There’s just so much that can go wrong these days.

Certainly, I’ve never been a low-key person, even as a child. Still, I don’t remember being this fearful before. Before what? Before the global pandemic that forever altered my interactions with society? Before becoming middle-aged and experiencing more fully the range of loss and grief a human being is capable of? Honestly, how are we supposed to deal with our human fragility? With the reality we can’t control or predict anything, but must continue to endure, in spite of that fact?

Relax, he’s probably stuck in traffic. Or, after twenty-four years together, I can predict why he’s late. He’s an architect and an artist and attention-deficient. He thinks two minutes have passed when actually, it’s been twenty. His thoughts cascade down rabbit holes. Often, he’s caught wondering how a particular dumpster manages to balance on only three wheels, or why there are so many air ducts on top of a Subway sandwich shop. Then, he’ll begin researching ventilation systems, which somehow leads him to the latest article on the passive housing movement. So, he gets inspired to look up his college roommate, see what that guy has been up to—because they’re both architects—which snowballs into reminiscing about the music they’d used to like. The natural progression being that he spends fifteen minutes listening to 311 and reading the band’s biography on Wikipedia. That’s what’s happening, I assure myself. No cause for concern.  

But my mind keeps circling: What if? What if he’s late because something’s happened?

Followed by the forced response: Don’t be silly. He’s fine. He’s always fine.

Except for that one morning, hardly a year ago now.

When I’d said, “Bike safe,” like I did every day. As if the act of saying those two words provided him some sort of force field on his commute. He’d been frustrated when he left (though what had we even been bickering about?) and the first early autumn rain glossed the pavement, mixing with dust and oil that had been dry for months, creating a slick topcoat. And he’d taken a hard left turn, crashing to the ground, jinxed by the ill-timed intervention of physics.

His phone call came from the middle of a side road, where he lay conscious, but immobile. When I got to him, the discoveries came in pieces: that he’d require an ambulance. That the fall had broken the point where his hip merged with his leg—which would necessitate emergency surgery (and the insertion of a permanent titanium rod into his leg), which would cancel our once-in-a-lifetime vacation to Iceland the next day, which would render him unable to walk for two months.

After the medics arrived, they wedged a sheet underneath his bum to hoist him onto a gurney. During the process, his pain manifested into a guttural scream so raw the sound exploded out of his mouth and ricocheted against my chest. The force of it knocking me breathless.

Yes, what about that day? He hadn’t been fine on that day.

There was also that Tuesday night eight years ago, when I was at the yoga studio—like every other Tuesday night. While I was in the changing room, my cell phone rang. Upon answering, Mom’s unexpected voice came through the line, sobbing, yelling, manic: “Mel? Your dad’s dead. He’s dead! Dad died!” I stood there amongst other half-clad women in stocking feet and a sports bra. My brain short-circuited, trying to figure out what the hell to do next: to put my clothes back on or run into the street naked or throw the phone across the room and pray to God it would all go away.

Because really, you don’t ever know.

And if my husband is late because he’s been in some horrific accident, his car mangled, his unconscious body removed from the scene, how long will it take for someone to call me? To figure out, in spite of our different last names, that I am his wife? How will they know my phone number? Who are the “they”? How long should I wait before trying to locate him? Where would I even begin? With my mom? His mom? Hospitals? Police? Which bureau is the one to ask, “My husband has been missing one hour?” From TV, I’ve learned no one is even considered missing until they’ve been gone twenty-four hours. That must be right—right? There’s no way I could survive twenty-four hours in this state of ambiguous unknowing.

Ironically, my colleague and I had been joking with each other about our anxieties. How worked up we get when our partners are even a few minutes late. How we instantly begin to envision the worst. How overreactive we are.

How long ago had that conversation been? A month ago? Or two?

Because when I called her last week, she sounded terribly glum. I asked if she was under the weather. She responded, point-blank (what else could she do?): “You haven’t heard? My boyfriend died yesterday.”

A flash of lightning ripped through me—he was young, in his thirties, healthy—her words didn’t make sense.  

“I was looking for him all morning,” she said. “He was late again.”

It happens. It happens all the time.

Even recently, I’d sent a text to my friend, Chris:

Thinking of you; this is a photo of ocotillo blooming in Anza-Borrego State Park.

Chris was in her early 50s, battling stage four breast cancer. We hadn’t seen each other in over six months because of her weakened immune system and the threat of COVID. To stay connected, I sent her notes and photos often.

Not four minutes passed before her reply came through, or what I assumed would be her reply: This is Chris’ husband. She passed peacefully two days ago a little after 4 pm.  

My gaze blurred over the digitized letters, trying to compute that my friend and I would never again laugh together with our snide humor, never share another intimate story that only she could understand. And how—most incomprehensible of all—I’d been living in a world for two entire days where I believed Chris still existed, but she did not.

In that moment, everyone I knew became both simultaneously dead and alive, like Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment. The idea being that if a cat is sealed in a box with something that can eventually kill it, it’s unknown if the cat is dead or alive until the box is opened and the cat is observed.

The news of Chris hijacked any bit of reason left within me and I had to restrain my fingers from dialing each name in my contacts list one by one simply to hear their breath.

And now—my pulse quickening—how am I supposed to have faith that my husband is merely detained by some routine event?

But I guess that’s the trick to survive being human. Being able to assume everyone you know is fine until they’re not. The ability to suspend disbelief in order to keep one’s sanity. To remember that yes, the terrible and the unexpected lurk within each shadow, lay in wait around all corners. But so do the mundane and the status quo. And that, in more instances than not, it is these latter two who run up to greet us as we move throughout our days. To appreciate the strange, omnipresent spectacle of human perseverance that somehow continues to buoy us through—not just during the unthinkable and the unfathomable, but also sustains us in moments like this, through the daily occurrences of the uneventful and the unremarkable.

So, I inhale deeply. Fill my lungs. Try to calm my overexcited nerves. Repeating: He is fine, everyone you know is fine.

Then, my ears prick at the faint scrape of metal on metal, key against lock.