Hospital Time, Day 15

stunned yet admiring

I’m sitting in the recliner chair wedged tightly against Sophie’s bed in our Walk-In Closet With a View. She is sleeping peacefully, breathing room air and only days away from discharge. The sun is setting behind us but light curves around and hits the buildings and clouds, makes everything orange, glows. I don’t know the words to describe the light inside and the light outside as it grows darker and the orange turns to black and the lights go up all over the city, the inimitable skyline a tiny blip like Oz. The silhouette of palms lingers on a glass building and the shadows of another look like the columns of some Roman ruin. A large dark bird swoops past. The world inside, this room an aquarium, machines humming, voices outside muffled when we shut the door, the click of the handle. Time to think to muse, to meditate and mull. The world outside, the light, yes, the coming eclipse, the horror of Gaza of the piles of dead children, those who defend the actions of a madman and an army, a country whose existence, threatened, morphs its inhabitants and believers into the same monsters who wish to eradicate them. The dumbness of violence. My adrenaline has subsided enough here inside to feel numb, bewildered, small. How did all of this happen in our small life? Hospitals shrink those who are inside of them. No matter how kind how efficient how brilliant or perceptive the people in the hospital, their life seems a slog of protocol, exhaustion, and I am at once suffocated, terrified and grateful. Allowances given, the doctors who listen, our heads together, put. Always, the nurses. Always, the people who sweep and clean and wipe down the rooms. Always, the patients who lie sick, especially those who are alone, the woman next door who wakes and screams over and over, a frequent flyer, the nurses say, and I’m reminded of an asylum, something horrible and helpless even as intentions are good. The lights in the houses on the hills outside the window twinkle. Always, Sophie’s valor.