The doors open automatically and the parking lot does not care. There are eleven cars in various states of cleanliness. A plastic bag has lodged itself against a wheel stop and is making a sound in the wind that no one is listening to.
She walks to her car — the beige one, third row, she remembers because she had to remember — and sits in it for a while without starting the engine. The seat is warm from the afternoon sun. This is unexpected. She had forgotten that afternoon was warm now, that the season had done something in the time she was inside.
Her hands are in her lap.
The hospital is behind her. She does not want to look at it but she can feel it the way you feel a building when you’ve said something terrible inside it. She had not said anything terrible. She had not said much. She had been asked how she was doing and had said fine and had not understood until later that fine was the wrong word, that it would take months to find the right word, and that even then the word would be approximate.
Through the windshield: the sky, which is the particular blue of late March, which is the blue of things that don’t know yet that spring is coming and so are still doing their best winter impression. Two birds cross it. Not toward anything visible. They are going somewhere specific because birds always are, but from here they look like punctuation.
Someone knocks on the passenger window and she startles — it’s a man who wants her parking spot, who has misread her stillness as preparation to leave. She shakes her head. He drives on.
This is the thing about grief: it requires continuous translation. You are always having to explain to the world that you are not doing what it thinks you’re doing. You are not about to leave. You are not fine. You are not hungry when people say you should eat. You are in a parking lot in the blue of late afternoon in the last week of a winter that doesn’t know it’s ending, and the seat is warm in a way no one prepared you for, and the plastic bag is still making that sound, and the birds are gone now but the sky they crossed is still there.
She starts the car.