The truly terrible cacophony of smells and noises.
You try finishing your dinner with someone across the curtain shitting the bed.
Someone in the hallway on the phone, crying. "There's nothing else they can do for her."
That was the third floor.
On the seventh floor, a man with green socks gets to walk laps around the hall all day. There's the obese man. The young man. Nurse Joan with a beard and venom toward Hillary Clinton. Chatty nurses. The nurses who zone out to your TV for awhile without really saying a word. Packs of visitors who travel in a cloud of stale cigarette smells. An endless ricochet of beeping IVs. The neighbor needs help going to the bathroom for the fifteenth time since I've been there. Wants to tell the nurse a joke.
There's a look of desperation on everyone's faces, and not just here. On the highways too. No one's seen the sun in months. Not really. It's just a hurried shuffle from vent to vent under layers and layers. It takes a toll. It hasn't even been a terrible winter but there is an urgent lean toward Spring.
I feel like this is doing something to me.
I'm here and there's nothing I can do except be here now. Minutes and hours indistinguishable. Surprised to see it's still daylight out of the windows by the elevator. There nothing more to do except be here and that is enough for now. But there's the very real knowing that I can't stay. I cannot. A matter of self preservation. 96 Westbound takes me to 19 or 23 again and the highway is an endless tongue lapping up depression, bare tree limbs on both sides of the sky, reaching and never filling the space. In gatherings around town all I see is a sea of camouflage and disease and addiction. A town full of trauma. Pale like there's no telling what's spirit and what's flesh. Haunted, not holy. I have no idea how I escaped all of this.
Seeing dad withered away to skin and bones is a confusing overlay of life leaps. Like seeing him truly for the first time and like seeing him for the last time at the same time. They're the kinds of visions you push all the way to the bottom. The kind you stand on with all your weight so it cannot possibly surface. The kind that has you crying driving up the parking ramp. A3Fish. A2Apple. 21 Days without a full night of sleep. Without a shower. Without any real idea of when.
What are we? There is so much going on inside.
