How everything loops and blurs, a spiral, an ouroboros. The nurse rolls you to your side and does things without asking or warning and casts you back to the last long hospital stay when you didn’t yet speak the language and finally reconciled yourself to the indignities by saying it was probably just that you didn’t understand. You understand now: some people are just unpleasant. And back then at the end you had a baby and now they take out every possibility of that. A friend asks if you’ll get anything in a jar to take home but it’s too late. This is a closed loop.
The food is of course awful, an assembly line of pale bland food that you nevertheless greet with excitement. Bread and cheese, bread and cheese. Later, dried fruit, just like 30 years ago, hidden like Halloween candy, eaten like secrets.
The way fluorescent lights look as you are wheeled under them. Air vents. Water stains on paneled ceilings.
On the first morning you get a message from someone you do not know who is reading a book you started compiling some 12 years ago. Your friend was going to the hospital for the same surgery and you wanted to cheer her up so you embarked on a five year project that she wound up funding. The next day another message from another person in another state. You lost something, you gained something. You’re not sure what you’re holding now.
Plastic tubes connect you to medicine, translucent drips, the blood surging out and then back. More loops, catching on door frames. Sometimes you are caught off guard even now by life in a less litigious society, where you are expected to look after yourself.
People look after you, people write and keep you from floating away. People visit, which stuns and delights you and you try to remember to keep the body a private thing even while it feels as distant from you as meat on the table is distant is from the animal it was.
There are scars across your belly including your navel which feels almost unjust. This connected you as a baby and now it has disconnected you as a mother. It doesn’t need to mean more than it means; you know this. You were never going to have another child and there is no mourning here. It still seems weird.
In the morning you sit up without using the grab bar and know it’s time to leave. The mist settles on the landscape outside and leaves a pale coating of frost on the grassy hills and the windows. You look at the slice of bread spread thick with flavorless cream cheese and you don’t want it but you eat in anyway, just in case, and the last sunrise orange disk of dried apricot.
