i wanted to write yesterday in the emergency room.
i’d brought a book with me but not my computer. I don’t want to distract from pain with work.
The waiting room around me sagged, tired. Yellowed posters taped to stained walls, Abuse to our Staff Will result in Prosecution. Plastic chairs around the room hosting patients with their plus-one. For each pair, one person’s hand lies bandaged in a kitchen towel or clenched to the abdomen.
It’s shockingly like primary school.
the hours drag by while we cross and uncross our legs, fiddling with our hands, waiting for the sound of our names to be called by someone who knows what to do now. Is it my turn?
And then, color.
A 7-year old girl was flitting around like a hummingbird in a fluorescent pink stretch gown, glossy hair braided and clinking with 80 plastic colored beads, round and regular but also shaped like seashells and birds and things. i sidelong peeked. Mesmerized. i wished i could just stare to my heart’s content, like in my drawing days, when a sketchbook and a watercolor pen vetted me to stare til my eyeballs dropped.
The bright pink of her dress skipped between the kids’ drawing table in the corner and bounced back outside, where the sunshine waited.
If I had my sketchbook I’d draw her and her majestic pregnant mother who was draped in a striped yellow-white robe and headscarf, African style. The other faces around me were tight-lipped, drawn and dazed, but the mother ambled calmly to and fro, relaxed as in her own kitchen, smiling with undimmed radiance as she bent her long neck to whisper “small operation” to her companion as she sat back down.
if i had my sketchbook I’d also paint the two young women, with disc-round faces and long black ropes of hair. They came in bright matching sets of robes and headscarves, Arabic style. One canari yellow, one white.
(Why does everything feel touchingly harmonious when it happens in pairs?)
One hour next to them makes me think of the cinnamon-hued fabric sitting next to the sewing machine at home. Waiting to become a summer dress. It will have to wait longer. But I’ll think of these women when I wear it.
a few months ago a friend told me how her consciousness never remembers what people wear, or what color was their rug or house that she visited yesterday. what she remembers is the emotional content.
it’s silly. but i was gobsmacked.
the world is a non-stop, fascinating assault of texture to me.
i was recently reading into a kind of neurodivergence that sounded suspiciously familiar, and had stopped short at the symptom “utterly immersed in sensual experience of matter. constantly conjuring things to watch stroke taste, every minute of every day.” i’d finished the sentence and stilled my hand, that had been petting for half an hour the soft inner pelt of my abaya like you would a sleeping cat.
The nurse calls me and inspects me and sends me back to the waiting room. I sink into a chair next to a broad shadow of a man. The whites of his eyes glow against his charcoal skin and braids and clothes.
The admittance doors swing open from round the corner and an out-of-sight nurse barks a patient name just as a phone erupts in tinkling ringtone. Nobody heard the name. Question-mark glances bounce around the room.
i lean towards my neighbour. “what name did he say?”
“i didn’t hear. the phone rang.” he points to my finger dressed in blood-soaked gauze and he smiles, saying with a nod, “courage”. a soft statement. i nodded and waved my other hand. “it’s no big deal.” let my eyes fall back to the Kindle screen i can barely see.
i would have loved to say hello - but i was too flayed. literally. 2 hours earlier I was making chocolate energy balls when my finger caught in the blender, that inexorable milisecond where i’d been kind of loopy dreamy all morning, and realise i’m pressing the On button with my other finger still in there and can’t pull my muscles back fast enough to stop it. the “oh shit” where i could roll my eyes at the consequences trickling downstream, clear as glass, long days fraught with pain and recovering and twisting unpleasantness and all my plans thrown up in their air like dandelion seeds. the “ugh i can’t bothered with all this” milisecond.
now my finger’s hidden in gauze and this man offers me the cloudy olive branch of compassion and connection, of two people sitting in an emergency room on a spring saturday, being kind instead of glued to his phone - and i cannot take it. reach out to meet him a little.
i’ve been tending my mother’s fretting for the last two hours and chit-chatting to distract her from her “it hurts me more than it hurts you” agony of mothering as she packed me in the car and drove me here.
my mind feels like a half-eaten candy-floss, teased from its stick by strong teeth.
the wound isn’t that bad. Just the flesh on the tip of the finger. the blade didn’t reach nail or bone.
why on earth doesn’t it hurt?
my mind skitters and slithers to avoid the reality waiting under the bandage, the mess of hacked-up flesh.
this really should hurt.
life is so mysterious.
i would love to reciprocate the charcoal man’s warmth but if he wants to chat longer than i want to chat, if he turns from angel of mercy to hitting-on-me-human i will have no defenses left to deflect, to get up and go sit elsewhere. no reserves left to push away even a raindrop headed for my eyeball.
my social skills sometimes vaporize like this.
it’s pretty pathetic. I guess that’s okay. I can be pathetic in the emergency room.
so i give him a smile
and talk to this man from inside my mind.
hey there
you are very kind and it’s soothing to sit next to you.
i hope you are okay? obviously - you’re not - you’re here.
i don’t really dare to ask you, what brings you here. i hope it’s something silly like me. something that will be over in a couple weeks
(my mother recently had 1/3 of her finger surgically removed and it just grew right back, so my notion of what is grave and not regarding digits is particularly precise at the moment.)
you do not look in pain, particularly. unless you are just also being calm. i am busy not staring at your face the way i am busy not staring at the girl’s clinking beads.
i really can’t think of anything to ask you other than what brings you here and i don’t want to know in case it’s terrible.
i hope you are okay. well. that you are going to be okay.
sorry i am not together enough to meet you more. i hope you can feel me.
i’m pretty sure you can.
i pulled the wheel of fortune card this morning. same card i pulled the day i learned my dad had terminal cancer.
this morning i’d looked at the card. the smile on the king’s face, who emerges at the top of the wheel with a lifted glass and a queen on his lap, and took it as a sign of joy.
well.
the emergency room bubbles over with little signs of joy.
the nurse who grimaced as she inspected my finger wore turquoise scrubs - and turquoise-pink-purple sneakers with cartoon fish on them. she looked designed to cheer up children and I felt as consoled by her as I would be by the chocolate treats that got me here in the first place.
last time i had surgery, the German surgeon did the same. he had olive green scrubs - and wore nikes in the exact same shade.
nothing can persuade me these tiny acts of peacocking don’t matter. don’t infect the atoms around with ripples of harmony and care and delight.
bright pink in the emergency room.