It's October

 

Emergency rooms, with their overwhelming smell of cleanliness and vacancy of audible conversations, are precisely the place to have tiny epiphanies. Those little universal collisions of black holes, creating a ripple of consequences, become the forks of one’s life. Moments of awareness, some higher power slows time down to give you a chance to process your reality.

I wanted to believe that I was alone that night in the emergency room because I was strong enough to manage on my own. Sitting in that lobby, my body woven in a fetal position, I realized I’d been holding on to this delusional faith that if you could have…. You would have.   

That morning, when I was told, you have until October to clearly see your baseline, I had hope. I hadn’t spent months in debilitating pain, yet. I had hope because I’d been through this before and I’d experienced a miracle. I grasped tight to the hope in every word every spoken to me because I had faith in something I wasn’t promised. I had hope because I had you. But. Thinking back…that was a lie I told myself.

It’s a funny thing that happens to the heart when hope is ripped away. When, in the absence of light, we become the very darkness we preached we despised. You can be the sweetest soul everyday of your life but in the heat of a struggle, you’ll know without a shadow of doubt if your soul is kind. Your reaction is precisely the mirror which exposes the true nature of your soul. Thinking back… the you I know is a figment of my imagination. 

The timetable was meant for awareness. I never corrected you when you got mad about my saying I only had until October to live because knowing, there is no magic surgery that’s going to fix this, there isn’t some magical medicine that is going to make the masses unravel themselves from my brain. There is no profound love which could make a forehead kiss “make it all better.”

The clock is done ticking, the time has run out. The battery is slowing, and the lack of sleep is driving me mad. I wish I was a cat. Not because I want 9 lives. I’d rather be an animal in this pain with a loving owner. We all know how it ends…. At least there is kindness in that sort of love.

©AprilBSunshineBooks2024