Late Summer 2003
My 22nd birthday.
I'd
spent 6 weeks in the hospital by then. I wasn't a patient, but I slept
in a bedside chair watching him sleep most nights. I didn’t know what
to do with myself. I went home to shower every couple days, I wore the
same jeans and hoodie for weeks, comfort was king. I smelled bad, my
hair stood up, and my eyes hollow and outlined by years that hadn’t yet
belonged to me.
I
had a love affair with Kurt Vonnegut that summer. I hadn't the time for
one with a woman and at that point I couldn’t even remember last having
an erection. It rained a lot and the puddles were filthy, smelly. I
would sneak out and sit in the park across the street, looking at the
pigeons and trying to lose myself in his books. I tried to imagine a
world unaccompanied by blue and red lights and that awful wailing. I
was learning to look the other way when death was around. I learned to
stick to the sidelines to stave of insanity.
I learned that chemotherapy is the ugliest word I'd ever heard.
I
saw men breathing blood like dragons fire in radiation clinics on the
basement floor (I think they keep the worst situations in the basement,
away from the pleased as punch publics eyes as they visit Jimmy who is
getting his tonsils removed). The screams of childrens whose muscles
had been frittered away by chemical cures would burn through the walls.
At first they'd make you jump, they would make the hairs on your neck
raise with enough electricity to power a city block. The screams would
make you sit upright in your chair and lose place in your book,
shifting your legs to try to regain some sense of balance that is
nonexistant. Sensitive screams at the slightest pokes, at their own
mothers touches. The most chilling part is the way you get used to
them. While you continued feeling sorry for these children, you just
wished that they'd keep it to themselves, keep the screaming down
because you've heard it a million times before. Through them I
learned that the pain I'll face in my life (like life itself, I
thought) is nothing more than a passing inconvenience. The peel of
a bandage.
Disgusting
fat women would share stories with a smile in waiting room
chairs. Flipping through Cosmo and chatting about weather and
politics and the daily things that happened in the outside world; as if
there was no such thing as death and dismemberment and crying children
and parents in pain and anguish. Everything repulsive in the world was
hidden in these walls. I wanted to kick up my chair and pluck
those magazines from their fat fingers. I wanted to push them into
a wall and scream to them, spittle flying forth from my lips. I wanted
them to realize, like I did, what was going on in here, what these
people, what my brother, were going through. That all the gawdy jewelry
and inconvenient rainy days don't make a lick of difference (that
nothing did). I wanted them to stop living their high lives and
succumb to my sorrow. I wanted them to come down from their Michigan Avenue coops and wallow in what was the true way of the world.
But
I smiled at them politely and looked away. Because what I wanted most
was to be indistinguishable, to get through these days without a peep.
I wanted to be a shadow, leaned high against a wall, meeting no ones
gaze.
It wasn't until later that I realized I was wrong.
