It’s nice that they start putting up signs along the road for the hospital a few blocks before you get there, because after a while the numbness starts to fade and you need something to guide you.
Even if it’s a familiar traverse. You basically need your hand to be held.
You need to be told, left, next left, right, keep going, turn here.
Your head can be a’swim.
It is evident now that it matters not- how woven in you are to the fabric of people’s lives. It won’t prevent you from vaporizing to nothingness at the 1st instance of death. Death won’t hesitate to do nasty black-magic tricks with your face, making you vanish. It’s not shy. There is no couth. It’ll greedily, hungrily claim you. Your binds won’t keep you. The strings you’ve spent your days fortifying can’t hold you down or tie you to another in the physical realm.
And yet- it does matter- as it is the fabric that stitches the rest of us together. That covers us. That warms us on this breezy plain. This warm place. Placid place. Bone-chilling place. Sweltering place, where there has been time for every kind of weather and sensation until perhaps the day where an abrupt cut-off occurs and you find your way navigating in a metal box- eyes fixated, and on the look out for reflective, square, blue H’s of signage to tell you where to go. Where to find a friend in distress, removed from hanging in the balance.
If you love someone that’s been in an accident, there’s no telling what you’ll do. Will you cry and howl? Will you retract into yourself, sink your eyes back, seep into your own skin? Will you adopt a straight-backed, stomach-lining-acidifying stoicism? Will you be like me, where every ounce of brain exits it’s holding places and flees for complete cloud cover- leaving me temporarily to fumble for words, and forget all the names of people known to me for years when the nurse asks for introductions.
A thick soup of space replacing my free thoughts. A questionably protective gelatin that pads my consciousness in order to keep the inevitable away & at bay for more moments. Perhaps. Seems sensible amongst the nonsensical…
When you arrive at the hospital conglomerate- the mass complex of buildings with incongruous architectural bids in huddle- the maze of pain and occasional welcomed wellness reports- your feet may take over- you may run as if your life, their life, -life- depended on your pulse; contributing. You may want to cry out to the 3rd run-in with reception about your confusion as to where is my friend. I don’t understand anything at all right now. Where even are we? How could you do this?
Every station. Every elevator. Every corridor. A repetition of it’s rude self, each not leading to his room. Time ticking cruel modules.
Have you ever seen a loved one propped up with a plastic brace, wired, hooked to monitors and intubation? Liquid red lines leaking from his ears; blackened, swollen eyes?
None of the machines synch up with their bell-sounds, their compressing, their dripping or collecting. There is no calming rhythm in which to find a small piece of peace.
There are plastic bobs and bits everywhere, linking a network to create breath and eased airflow.
There are computers with the sole purpose to oversee heart function- where their whole life they scribble and drag green lines across bowed screens that inform people of the seemingly small spectrum between okayness and trouble.
If you experience a friend on life support you’ll quite likely feel a combative compulsion to sit beside them and grab their arm, all the while the same part of you, but on the backside of it- wanting to leave the area the second you smell the room.
Run like a wounded deer in hard light.
Head for dry, high land far from quaking earth.
Like the first time you see a naked lady dancing across the stage; that desire to lay your eyeballs across her body, and the other to fumble in your pockets and squint squint squint hard and the sense of shame- feeling discomfort blame-able by a church thought you’d never even subscribed to.
But more perverse.
I can’t be the only one who’s claws extract.
I’m dangerous there. With their naked arms. I’ve learned twice. I will dig.
I will dig and I will wait for response and want response and sink further into grief and fear at lack of response. I want to hear them or see them react and make them mad. Get mad at me goddamn it and feel me right now! Just feel.
This arm will be false-warm. It will feel slightly gummy. I will only touch the warm parts. I tried to hold his hand because my mind had blocked the memory of what happened last time, but no. The hands are already cold and gone and I do not recommend them. I recommend staying away from appendages least ye be of masochistic proclivity.
Stay.
Away.
The hands are gone and this is where the death begins; at the edges.
And the questions begin to bubble at the sorry surface.
Are you here, friend? Are you hovering above us, like they say? Are you afraid or hurting? Is there a song that’d put you at ease?
Then you’re just there, and you want to go. And you want to stay. And what’s a girl to do. And the shock won’t release you and it will take so long to thaw and you will feel like you’re in on a terrible joke with a small slice of others- against the rest of the people like the Jackelope in South Dakota. Like some silly pact gone unspoken with friends to make the rest of the world feel like shit; wishing they’d gone to see him that one last time they’d meant to; gone sailing with him more; not been a flake those times- because he was always there. One of the few.
It’s the most impossible thing to believe. Absence. Permanent absence. The hum on the line. Forever static. No more-ness.
And you think: life without you? Well I just wasn’t ready. And we had plans. And you had plans. And that is lovely but meaningless without someone to make them become.
And this gurney wasn’t made with you in mind. Your strong body is the wrong body and how unfair is this.
The slightest infraction- I tell you/ believe me- my friend is gone and do not fuck with me now because fury will reign down upon you because my feelings are so full of barbs that your spilled, spoiled blood has been matched by my own punctured heart and my anger at your loss will not bring you back but I burn. I burn so hard now that I am a flame. And I must be an inch down the line in stages of grief because I’ve set my numbness on misdirected fire with nothing to ignite but fog. And yet still, I find this all utterly unbelievable.
Please shake me to wake me.
Inevitably you will be woken up, but it will be from inconsiderate neighbors who are wearing the all in all twin blinders of alcohol and summer weekend feelings, who aren’t really doing anything terrible. You will yell at them and you will tell a complete stranger to shut the fuck up and go fuck themselves. So bad you will yell so bad and loud and mad at them that you need to stand before a fan to calm down and cool out. You will pace for a while there after and want to punch the walls. You will by hyper aware of their normal movements below you in their own apartment once they’ve hurried back inside. You will find an unattractive, indulgent satisfaction with making them scared a little, or at least you will perceive their fear and feel a small triumph. You’ll wonder about that. You will be the biggest buzzkill. It will only suck for everybody. I will not bring your loved one back. But…. given this behavior being very alien to you- you can at the very least have a private chuckle that he’d have been been kinda proud….
Pigeon Heart Ponderings 