The Wrong Kind of Right

Some days, you keep it to yourself. You look into the eyes of another faceless doctor looking back into yours, telling you the wrong thing. You keep breathing in and out as he rationalizes why he’s not ordering the right tests and you remember that he’s human, too. The instinct to push harder, to assert yourself, bites at your flesh, but is won over by fatigue and self-preservation. The hard lines of his form, his erect stature, and his condensed speech tell you there is no point in trying to sway him.

You conjure some gratitude because at least he’s giving you what you came in for: IV fluids. The ancient hand sanitizer dispenser seems to hang dejectedly from the wall, reflecting back to you the heavy doom nestled in your cells. You try to convince your sleepless, oxygen-deprived brain that not every tattered corner of this room is a harbinger of more torture to come.

You send a text telling a friend you’re chilling at “happy hour.” Does he want to join? You try to cultivate a shred of levity in the midst of the burden that burns to the tips of your eyelashes. Beyond the façade of humor lives an authentic invitation to come closer. You mentally scroll through your list of contacts and most recently texted friends knowing there’s not a single person you can deeply confide in.

You shudder with anticipation over the dreaded, methodical question. “Is there anyone else you would like to add to your emergency contact list?“ Attempts to isolate this experience to the here and now demand more than you can muster. The catastrophe of now seems to blur infinitely with the calamity of the future.

You listen to the ripples of your own laughter reverberate back to you as your mom says a blessing over your IV fluids, calling upon “unnamed angels” to wipe clean the slate of countless woes. You wonder if maybe, somehow, someway, it could be that simple to find a home in your own skin.

A brief flicker of twinkling starbursts flowing from the IV fluids, mixing gloriously with my blood and permeating my entire being with perfection dances across my mind. Angel dust, golden light, the notion of some infinitely attuned spirit to rescue me contrasts sharply with the hard angles of reality. I try to hold onto the afterglow, anyway.

You take it one drip, drip, drip at a time. The doctor can be wrong. And this can still be somehow right.

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