There were maybe five doctors/med students poking me with what I imagined to be sticks. They're smiling, oddly, like they're laughing at me. Laughing like, “You would not believe what we just did to you.” I bet it had something to do with my throat, tho. And probably the side of my head. “Why's my throat hurt?” This is curious. I figured the side of my head would hurt, 'cuz of all the knives, and cutting, and pulling, and stitching. But why my throat? “We had a tube down there,” they tell me. They cover their mouths and chuckle. Hee-hee. That's great guys. Really great. You got me with that one. “What room am I in?” “Recovery.” It's just like I imagined. It's a happy place full of drugs and white coats. The thing that it's most full of, and the thing that makes it the happiest place on earth, is being done with surgery. It's totally full of beingdonewithsurgery. Brimming with it. “You want a couple Vicodin?” “Yes.” “You wanna lay down for about an hour?” “It's like you've known me my whole life, nurse.”
Before I moved into this apartment I had a recurring fantasy. It would involve a right-hand turn onto Westminster In my green Honda. My wheels would strain slightly and slide over dirty and rain slicked pavement. Onto a drab street whose old trees line either side. Their leaves would be bright orange and red, but muted by the gray clouds above them. Wet brick and wet cars. Tail-lights and brake-lights shining in the evening overcast. And these are the Sesame Street days before I had cares. Or before cares had begun embedding themselves up there in the form of memories. One month I've lived here and it seems to have been a problem of music that keeps muddying up that moment I've looked forward to for an entire summer. And today it finally hits. I splash through a shallow puddle whose falling drops sync up with arpeggiating notes. I don't need it every day. Just once in every while.
I woke up one eye at a time. It's a trick I learned from an older guy in college. Sometimes when you go to bed, you do so in such a manner (physically) that there's no telling when you might wake up, and no telling what kind of heinous things may have happened while you slept. It was a nice dream from which I woke, which made the “being pulled out of my own skin” sensation of coming to even less pleasant. Something about a guy named Stacie building a house of cards on a granite bar-top. Waking up is one of the few (if not the one and only) instances when “sudden” or “wrenching” become the same thing is “gradual.” And it was this kind of transition with which I made the trade from a dark bar with points of obnoxious light to the morning-glow flood that fills my bedroom every day. And where is that music coming from? So creepy. So out of place. And so beautiful. I fumble in my covers and find the tiny source that's been working away so diligently for so many hours. I turn it off. If every day started with a specter (the kind you only see in the gray that buffers the night from the day) I'd have a lot more to talk about, but a lot fewer people who would listen.
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