When you're used to it

20

I sat there and watched a strand of hair float in the air before me. That’s where I am at. And that’s ok right? Because when I look down at my thighs I can still see bright blue veins filled with blood. I can still move my fingers and get them to touch each other and fold and scratch and hold. I can reach down and fill my hands with the thick skin of my stomach. I am still here. I still have a place here on this earth of wonders. I remember when I went to the hospital. Because it was not unlike where I sit today. It was when my dad was dying. He might’ve been already dead. That part of the memory has made itself cryptic. I was in the hospital, before or after my world did a couple of back flips and landed on a crooked neck, feet in the air, a Picasso sculpture ahead of its time. Or, I would discover later, in all honesty quite late to the party. I was in the hospital and I walked out of a room and slipped on the floor. There was a broom or a mop or some sort of rod, the end of which my sternum landed on on the way down. Once I was down. However it goes. Went. I couldn’t breathe. There in the white hallway of the safest place for a human body. How was it that this was supposed to be the safest place for my body and yet I had no faith at all that it could ever do anything for me? It seemed unnatural, coming here to die or to postpone death or to be born in the sterility of this controlled environment. It seemed counterintuitive, for something so controlled to welcome such chaos and emergency. Or perhaps it made sense. It was, in fact, a normal reaction. One displayed in a very many of us: to welcome chaos and unpredictability with extreme rigidity. To hold on and control control control in the face of unbelievable, astonishing, destabilizing surprise. Bad surprise. A surprise that causes no joy, or perhaps a small ounce of relief sometimes only. That is what people do. That is why I was in the hospital. He had tests to do. We had eyes to put on him. I had a duty to perform and a schedule to keep and after the hospital I had a list of meaningless things to check off for no other reason than they gave me somewhere to be and something to do that made me feel like I was alive when part of me was dying. I thought of this list while I gasped for breath with the pole all but absorbed into my chest. I couldn’t even roll over onto my back. Couldn’t see the nurses run toward me, couldn’t register that my dad was no longer here to pick me up with a laugh and tell me I was okay with a smile. I couldn’t breathe. No air was coming through the pipes it usually comes through. Those we never think about. Those we could never live without. There were too many parallels. Too much irony in the fact that we were all, to varying degrees, suffocating. Under the weight of everything and the weight of nothing. Pressure or loneliness. Gravity was holding us to the ground, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t also trying to push us through it. I was lifted, cold hands–both gloved and not–in my armpits puppeteering me to a seat, a chair, pushing my back against the wall and giving me varying looks of concern all the way to exhausted passivity. I needed one of them to punch me in the back. I needed them to undo what gravity had just done. I needed them to get my dad, wake him up from wherever he was because he knew what to do in all situations and I didn’t. Never had to learn. They eventually figured it out. Air came back inside me and made me feel less plankish. I gained a whole new perspective on my roundness. How unstable it is to be empty. How reassuring it is to be inflated, full, strong. Alive in a physical way. They took me to the X-ray room. I remembered a story I’d read about the man who had discovered the X-ray machine. How he had died a miserable death, filled with cancers, because he hadn’t realized how bad the radiation was for himself. I felt sad for him. Not that he died, but that he was punished by something that would inevitably alter the course of humanity’s history. Something he had made up. Something he had created. It had killed him. There was something perverse in there. Something reminiscent of what happened to some parents. There was a problem in loving too much. I stood there against the metal plate, a thick sheet of rubber velcroed around my butt. Why only there? Shouldn’t we be protecting my stomach too? My brain? It was strange that those two fleshy, fatty cheeks were more prized than the gray matter that made me as functional a human being as I could be. Not a psychopath at least. Not to others, at least. I caught a glimpse of the X-ray on the computer screen. I looked at my ribcage, my lung–invisible puffs of air. I saw inside myself. The outline of my arms. The cavern that kept me alive while I complicated matters on the surface. I couldn’t get the image out of my head. That I was alive in a way that didn’t care what I did on top. For that part of my body, all that mattered was doing its job. It was enough. It was more than enough. And it would be so simple for it to stop. And it would stop. One day. This was a miracle with a timer. That I would walk out of here with it was kind of creepy, eerie. It was so much power. So much power for someone not to use…I walked out of the radiation room of doom with a bruise making strides across my chest. They wanted to continue observing me for internal bleeding. Said it was dangerous to go home, and did I have anyone there? I remember then looking in the direction of my father’s room. Well, not his room. The room he was in. it wasn’t anyone’s room at all except for fate’s. One of the nurses, the one with concern and not passivity, he understood my conundrum. The dawning realization that was spreading, like my bruise, across a much more begrudging surface, that of my sweet soul. As ungraspable as the puffs that are my lungs. A milky way dotted with records of what had happened and how it would influence what would. He nodded his head. He said I could go home or stay here, but either way I had to be here in the morning so they could make sure the bruising would be settled by then. I had mixed feelings. I didn’t want to be alone. I couldn’t think of anyone I wanted to be with. I didn’t want to go back home. I was afraid, afraid of what it would look like now that I was no longer his child. Now that I had to interpret the world for myself, by myself, without my translator. Would I later think it was a blessing? Is ignorance truly bliss? All forces contort our humanity into evil. Being alone in the forest must be complicating his perspective. Being stuck in this house is souring mine. Would it all have happened if I hadn’t had to venture out on my own? Would it all have happened if I hadn’t been so loved? So protected that I never learned to look over my shoulder. Or ask the doctor to help me. I am here now. I was trying to be perfect and need no one. And I didn’t for a while. But now that I really have no one, it doesn’t seem so fun anymore. I don’t feel so free. I am a puff of air floating in someone else’s chest, keeping them alive while with every breath, I give them more air, and more, and more, and more. I still have my fingers though. I can make them move, even if I am stuck, in a suspended room, untouched, unhurt, unaccounted for.