But I’ll keep coming back until the day she doesn’t.
When I woke up in my own hospital bed four years ago, sore and bruised and in denial, I let that dark slimy part of my soul take over. It’s the insidious voice that tries to convince you that life is nothing but an endless, monotonous series of seconds you have to endure because you have no value. By letting yourself be victimized – yeah, I said it, victimized – you’re forever tainted. Weak. Stupid and foolish, easily suckered.
And that will never change.
Physical pain is bad enough. Time halts in place when you’re experiencing it, as if being graciously polite, giving pause to recognize the searing interruption. You can’t rush time. You can’t get through being at the receiving end of someone else’s intentional pain because you don’t count.
You’re not important.
You have no will.
It’s not even about losing control, because everyone loses control. All of us have moments where we are at someone else’s mercy. You have two choices: Reduce the opportunity for that to happen or hope that when it does happen, they aren’t evil.
And if they are?
Well...I don’t know.
I still don’t know.
I wish I had the answers. I’m just a guy showing up day in and day out to pry his girlfriend out of the little fortress she’s hiding in, hoping a five-pound box of sugar might help.
You think I have the answer?
I’m as clueless as anyone else.
And that pisses me off.
I set the open box next to her, down by her thighs. Her gunshot wound is healing enough that the dressing is smaller, less bulky, and it looks like she has more mobility. There’s a deck of cards sitting in front of her on the bed tray, a rubber band around them. A cup of red juice and some of her favorite potato chips sit there, tauntingly normal.
“If you don’t eat one of those, I’ll have to give them to the nurses, and they’ll flirt with me. Please don’t make the nurses flirt with me, Lindsay. One of them looks like she’s a box of chocolates away from pinching my butt.”
Nothing. No response.
I know from the doctors that she communicates with nods. Makes noise when she’s in pain. Harry and Monica talk about her “choice” not to talk, but I know better.
There is no choice here.
She can’t.
If I’m right, Lindsay is on her own, an astronaut adrift in space, enough oxygen to make it through each day but with the lonely terror of the unknown gaping before her, so silent it’s piercing, so darkly beautiful it hypnotizes you at the same time it paralyzes.
You just float.
But you float in a bleak abyss. It’s a painful infinity, numb and cold, blinding and agonal.
And I have to break her out of that internal jail.
She’s a prisoner of circumstance, locked away in her own mind. No one can pull you out of it. You have to decide for yourself.
But I won’t stop offering her a hand.
I won’t stop offering her a lifeline.
I won’t stop, period.
I sit on the edge of the bed, the closest I’ve come to her since I began visiting every day. She tenses even more. Her eyes are closed. I know she’s a box full of emotions. With her eyes closed, I have the luxury of studying her face, unhurried. The bruises are a motley explosion of haunting shades of blue, purple, and a yellowing edge on one, her black eye fading slightly. Tiny cuts cover her face, neck, and the skin leading to her bandaged shoulder. She’s so ethereal, even with so much injury.
I want to hold her. Wrap myself around her and wait her out. I want to be the shield for her.
I got there in time. She’s alive.
But was I somehow still too late?
“I love you,” I say with a reverent heart, closing my own eyes, my hand inches from hers. All the movement has to come from her. I can’t pull her to me. I can’t push myself on her, emotionally or otherwise.
She has to reach out for me.
Any other path isn’t authentic.
And doesn’t help her.
After a minute, I realize my breath has changed. A new pattern has emerged. I’m breathing with her. I open my eyes to confirm it.
Our chests are in sync.
And one single tear rolls down her cheek. It makes a prism, reflecting the blues and purples and browns and yellows of her cheekbone, her jawline, her neck, as it meanders from her emotional core down to the heat of her skin, buried in the folds of her body.
And still she breathes on.
It’s something.
It’s hope.
I’ll take it.
My damn phone buzzes. I ignore it.
I want to touch her. I want to reach for her hand. The connection is what I need. I think she needs it, too. Every night before bed my mind fills with live electricity, finally settling down abruptly, my subconscious delivering me into slumber like a light switch being flipped off.
I do not dream.
For that, I am grateful.
I will, though. Soon. I know how this goes.
The nightmares emerge when you’ve healed to the point where you can find a rope to pull yourself up just enough out of the abyss to begin to see a crack of light.
Paradox, right?
No one ever said reality was easy.
The short female doctor comes in, makes eye contact with me, then looks at the football field of chocolates on Lindsay’s bed with a raised eyebrow.
Her eyes flit from Lindsay’s face to mine. Her mouth sets with a grim determination.
“Can I have one, Lindsay?” she asks.
Lindsay nods.
I jolt.
The doctor shrugs, plucks a candy from the box, right smack in the center, and makes notes on a chart. Her throat spasms as she chews and she gives me a grateful look.
“Those are amazing.”
“Her favorite. Your favorite,” I stress, looking at Lindsay as I stand, the bed moving slightly as my weight comes off it.
No reaction.
“Can we talk for a moment in the hall?” the doctor asks.
I leave with her. She pulls me aside and whispers, “I can’t give patient information, but because you have security clearance, I’ll tell you this: half the nurses hate you for bringing all this candy, because Lindsay’s parents send it to the nurses’ lounge.”
“What about the other half?”