This is an example of a post that should be longer

When I feel the plastic tube enter my vein I scream.  It’s impossible to hold it in.  The nurse looks at me startled as if pain was an exotic foreign concept.

I shake my head when he asks if I’ve ever had an IV before.  He looks at me knowingly. “It could be worse,” he explains.  Instead of this 18th century hospital with questionable hygeine, I could be in India, he says, where he had food poisoning during one of his missions.  His voice is soothing and calculating. I’d have thought him infantilizing otherwise.

This emergency room has peeling walls and not enough beds.  I’m propped up on this aging leather dentist’s chair.  When I have to vomit they give me this old carton like one of those egg crates you get at the grocery store.  Did they just find this on the ground somewhere?  Has somebody already used it?  They seem ill-prepared for somebody who is vomiting.  Are we in a hospital?  

The nurse wheels me over to an elderly lady who shouts in the middle of the night.  Bless her soul, she seems to be a regular in this place.  In her own world, her body is stuck in this one and she can’t escape.  

I’m seen by numerous doctors and among the blood drawing, pricking, and bodily fluids in plastic cups, I’m grateful each time someone says they know English because at this moment Portuguese makes me want to cry my eyes out.  Throughout the early morning hours, new people straggle in and others are moved in a sort of 3am game of zombie musical chairs.  There’s an inebriated girl on her study abroad program who fell on her head and doesn’t know where she is.  As she passes out next to me, the nurses poke fun at her, and I don’t need to understand the language to interpret “a nuisance to actual sick people in this place.”

Diabetes, food poisoning, pregnancy, 24-hour virus are among the suspicions of my ailments, and as the time passes, I really don’t care what’s going on because I feel the pain in my stomach fade away, and I fall asleep for maybe 5 minutes with the old lady angrily wailing next to me.  After the sun rises, I can sit up again (very slowly), and the jolly doctor who has the morning shift tells me to drink tea and come back if the nausea does, to which I respond “Thanks, but I think I’ll be going now.” I send weary thank yous to the nurses and hobble out of there too weak for a fist pump.  For the rest of the vacation, all I look at are tea bags.




11.1.13

Pipes

She puts my face between her old, stiff hands and plants a kiss on both my cheeks. Her lips are dry, but her smile is warm, and I can't help but hold onto her for just a second longer after our embrace.

"You look just like my granddaughter," she says, her kind eyes resting on my face.

Her vision, like the rest of her body, is deteriorating, and she isn't really seeing me like everyone else sees me (I look nothing like an Italian and I'm sure nothing like her granddaughter), but something about the way her face softens when I'm in her presence makes everything okay.

"The pipes in this building are breaking down," she comments, wiping a drop of sweat off her forehead with her wrist. I too am sweating, and I comment that the place also needs a new paint job. It looks like a run down psychiatric hospital, its stained sea foam green walls peeling and withering.

"This place is really old," I say.

"Not at all," she replies, dismissing my comment with a wave of her hand. I realize how absurd the term 'old' must sound to her.

Her soul houses a lifetime of painful memories - a lost childhood, a husband who taught her lessons with his fists (she still has the scars), and a mysterious killer in the 80's called aids that took away her daughter and son-in-law. Just to name a few.

Old has nothing on her soul.

She stands there in the hallway, her broom in hand, physically frail, but her mind is another story. The woman is nearly gone, but her memories live on, confirming my fear that the worst things in life you will never forget.

She asks about my boyfriend and how our first year of cohabitation is going.

"You're a good girl, and you love each other right?" she asks.

It's the one million dollar question, the one that all of the elderly residents in this complex ask me nearly every time they see me. After all the struggles I've suffered though as an immigrant - impossible legal documents, isolation, mean looks, and cruel behavior, love has never been quite enough to keep me happy here. And yet, they ask me, as if in the end, it's the only thing that matters.

I'm skeptical.

But maybe they know something we don't.

She's looking at me, without smiling, waiting for an answer. She's lasted this long, and she's lost everything, but she still thinks there's hope for us.

"Yes, we do," I nod, "very much."

"Good," she says, and for now it's enough.

In a way, I wish this moment could go on longer because I know that once she disappears behind her door, I may never see her again, and she'll never know that I care about everything she has been through, even though I don't know her. We say goodbye to each other and leave, each behind creaking doors - me in the elevator, and her in her apartment, both of us unwillingly, but forced, to face another day alone.




5.27.12
(conceived July 2011)

Heartbeat

This time when I look at you you're far away, the farthest you've ever been from me.
off somewhere in your little part of the world,
behind hills and winding roads,
behind the sea,
and a volcano rumbling deep in the background.
This time I look into your eyes and see only pain,
glistening like glass,
your heart beating,
softly begging
for some kind of answer.
but all i hear is silence
from heaven
and emptiness
echoing
where there should be life.





09.18.11