Hospital Time, Day 8
If you close your eyes and open them, close your eyes and open them, close your eyes and open them, you can float to the ceiling, twirl, look down and all around, catch a cloud, dance to a beat or beep. So many beeps. I’m sitting here next to Sophie on day eight, somewhat dissociated but also right here right now, my words measured I am, (strangely), fine, my heartbeat regular, my hands nimble enough to knit (k6, k2 p1 k3 p3 row 68), a growing pile of blue in my lap. There’s a sun spot on the floor to stand in when it’s time to get up and stretch the legs, there’s Middlemarch and licorice (thank you M) the same man who swept the room last year, who carries away the bags of plastic of things hazardous who always smiles and nods his head, his broom quiet, he never lets the metal lid to the linens trash slam like the other one, he is so careful so quiet. Do you want the door closed? the heavy door that slides shut, shutting out, shutting away, a curtain drawn for privacy, in between the poking, the prodding, the changing position, the changing the chuck, the fiddling of dials and dripping of fluids the ventilator wheezing in out in out. The curtain drawn, a world beyond a stage where humans in blue, masked in yellow busy so busy pushing their COWS* pulling on gloves twirling in chairs. Twirling twiddling fiddling. She’s breathing on her own with some oxygen support. Or she’s getting more support or she needs more support. It’s Good Friday. Rain is coming.
For Easter Monday, a poem for those who were once Catholic and believed.
The Palm at the End of the Mind After fulfilling everything one two three he came back again free, no more prophecy requiring that he enter the city just this way, no more set-up treacheries. It was the day after Easter. He adored the eggshell litter and the cellophane caught in the grass. Each door he passed swung with its own business, all the witnesses along his route of pain again distracted by fear of loss or hope of gain. It was wonderful to be a man, bewildered by so many flowers, the rush and ebb of hours, his own ambiguous gestures - his whole heart exposed, then taking cover. Kay Ryan
I imagine it must all feel a bit surreal, the beeps and beats, hushed time ticking by, the world outside like a fiction, just now and now and now. Keep writing it down. It reads like a lifeline, an insistence on art, for Sophie. For us, too.
Your writing is like some marvelous hidden egg we find in the grass when no one not even the dog is looking.