Nonfiction
I don’t even know why I want a tattoo. Maybe to commemorate the missing breast. Maybe to re-define beauty. Maybe just to cover the scar. All I know is something about the space screams canvas.
When she was in her armchair, I brought her breakfast. She took a single bite then put down her spoon. “This is stupid,” she said. “This is only going to make it last longer.”
“How do you do it? How do you watch people die day after day?”
He asked the question as we passed each other on the threshold of his wife’s room. He was leaving after having said all the goodbyes that could be spoken with words.
She stands in my examining room unable to sit, pacing, then stopping tensely, as if paralyzed by the urge to pace. Three times she has made this appointment, three times a no-show.
I imagine that same sun bathing the trees outside, and all of the people who are blissfully, ignorantly healthy. On some level, I still find it unbelievable that such bodies even exist, able to do whatever they want without worry or consequence.
The blood I wished was mine almost killed Mindy. I began to wonder whether it wasn’t such a bad thing we weren’t related, but the thought felt so disloyal I dismissed it as soon as I could.
I’m too young now to know how soon imaginary play will decay and mature into rumors and cliques and senior boys with beards who look at me like I’m simultaneously a toddler and a toy.
A week after your arrival at the hospital, your gaze is once again on the multicolored fish. As you watch them swim toward an unknown destination, you imagine your death, as you have come to do every day.
Just being here today has come at a cost I won’t explain to you. Freedom in one moment became bondage in the next. Chains exploded into power. No one thing is any one thing.