Living It

In a hospital room I lie with a thin cotton gown covering my swollen abdomen that has grown so out of proportion the rest of me looks gaunt and protruding. There are sounds in the night air in a hospital that stir you inside and force you into thoughts of your life gone by. You remember your life as a series mistakes, miscalculations and mistreatment.

There is something in the squeak of a nurse’s shoes; something that happens when she walks the halls pausing in doorways sometimes entering and sometimes not. A nurse’s job is to see to the welfare of your body. She breezes in and out of your room like a moving shadow on the wall. She shines like the full moon on a completely blackened sky. The nurse hovers around you breathing in your whispers, touching your wrist to see if your heart is still beating, rolling your forearm back and forth to check the IV, reaching toward the ceiling to adjust monitors that will tell her when your time has expired.

Nurses are angels dressed in pure eggshell white monitoring your body without thought of your soul. As you lie in your bed on a mattress covered in plastic, held in place by rails with the rubber mat pulling water out of your backside, lower spine and thighs you can do nothing but think. Think of your regrets, regrets of not having more relations with people, good people. You wish for more sober moments. Moments in which your mind was clear of the fear that drove every decision you ever made.

Fear, fear of being alone, fear of not being alone; fear of not being loved, fear of being loved; fear of having your own thoughts, fear of not having your own thoughts. Fear! Fear of not knowing who you are, fear of knowing exactly who you are.

I am afraid of everything. As I lay her in this hospital terminally ill I can see how foolish I was. How easy life would have been to live if I had the courage to be the person I was brought up to be. True courage is not turning your back on your up-bringing.

When the nurse leaves the room you are left with just yourself. She doesn’t talk to you or with you she only talks at you. But her presence still counts as someone being with you. Her body standing by your dying body keeps the loneliness at bay. She provides a reprieve. Again she is an angel in eggshell white. This time she is providing comfort beyond your body and she doesn’t even know it.

The emotion floods into you like an ocean wave rolls onto a sandy beach. The salt water floods into a ditch dug by the hands of children playing in the afternoon sun unaware of the pain that comes with adulthood. You were innocent like that once. Free of worry, free of regrets, free of thoughts that went further than the next game to play and who you are going to play the game with.

Game playing is the lifetime employer of an adult like me; an adult who lives without a sense or belief of who they are or where they came from. You play games for attention, for love, to stave off loneliness. You sell your soul to the highest bidder. Life becomes a game that makes you feel alive when all you want to do is die.

I’ve sold my soul by sleeping with men, old men, who handed me a college degree for fellatio and lunch at the “Y” anytime he desired because his intelligence couldn’t control the animal in him. I’ve sold my soul to women. Women who would hold me and tell me they love me and would let me nuzzle in their breasts and sometimes nurse on them as long as after I shared my vagina and pleasured theirs as well. I’ve sold my soul to alcohol and betrayed the memory of my father and drown whatever part of him lived in me. I’ve sold my soul to other’s beliefs because unlike my mother I could not stand up for what I believed in because I never really believed in anything.

I’ve sold my soul to the government for money and prestige near the end. And in the end I sold my soul for a good beating by a man who was a drunk like me; a man who needed attention like me, who needed not to be alone like me who held me hostage and beat me to control me. I sold my soul to this man so I wouldn’t be alone, but in this hospital room I am alone. What will my soul go for after my death? Will there be anything left to sell of me in the afterlife? Will there be an afterlife for me? I have no soul left to sell so I lie here alone thinking listening to the squeak of the nurse’s shoes as she comes to check to see if I am still alive. But I’m not alive. I’ve been dead for years.