My hands are dry
From hand sanitizer.
I hate touching things
At hospitals.
The waiting room
Is suffocating.
I’m all sweat
And shaky hands.
Some yards away
Surgeons are removing
The cancer
On my grandmother’s kidney.
The family sits
Making small talk-
Jumping at every announcement
And pretending we aren’t.
We go through the motions,
Get food in the cafeteria
Take bathroom breaks.
I marvel at the monotony.
In my head, I’m seventeen,
Sitting at my mother’s bedside
For months, watching
As she suffers through ALS and pregnancy.
I’m having flashbacks,
I’m there, in my head
PTSD reminding me
Of feelings I’d rather forget.
I’m walking through hallways
Saying hello to nurses.
It smells the same,
And I’m hopeless.
I’m staring into space
Prompting concerned glances
From family members.
I’m fine, I say, I just need air.
I hide out behind a building,
Light a cigarette.
I cannot shake the feeling
That all the happiness
Has been sucked from the world.
A year ago today
I was fighting for my life,
Left homeless
And searching.
Here I sit,
Feeling much the same
As the lifetime ago
Everything changed.
And changed again.
This seems to be the only constant,
Nothing will stay the same,
But always,
I will have myself.
I feel healthy, reinvented
Until I’m hit with the truth
Like a bullet from a .45-
I am damaged.
Someone will walk behind me
And I will flinch, turn away.
I will sit in a hospital
And regress seven years
In mere minutes.
I will want to cry
And find myself too numb for tears,
Reaching for a drink
I shouldn’t have.
The surgeons emerge-
Everything went well, they say,
My mema is fine.
I breathe.
I’m exhausted,
I’ve aged twenty years.
I hold her hand, in her room
An hour later.
Everyone looks so frail
In hospital beds.
I remember everything.
I feel everything.
I find it ironic
That my grandmother
Spent an hour in the recovery room
And after a year of my own,
‘Recovered’ sounds more like a sick joke
Than anything attainable.
One of your best yet, CiCi. You captured that sense of sitting awkwardly, waiting. And I love the closing lines about recovery. Excellent.