Days in Lives

And they compound one on top of the other, like letters pressed into a box that you save for later, but then they are neglected. And here they are, these moments strapped head to heel, some existing like knives in the brain that you avoid getting near like a sunburn. Some pulsing with energy and bright lights and difficulty breathing for the joy of it. Some are mountaintops where you can see the rest of your life spreading out before you, a valley and another mountain and you can look back and know you saw this mountain coming too, probably 8 years ago when you were an entirely different person.

I travel down 5 stories to the streets, so many Midtown people like stranger-neighbors that fill up the hotels every damn day, then to a train, to a bus, to a sidewalk, to a hill that leads to work. Stacks and stacks of it. A woman with asthma, "Slow, deep breaths." Intubated twice, get out the airway box, but "let the medicine go to work." Let it reach inside your chest and massage your lungs while it makes your heart furious.

A man with a gunshot to his hip, ass-hip not groin-hip an important distinction, "Slow, deep breaths, and what happened?" and "Does it hurt here" and "Dolor aqui?" and a stab wound, and an assault, and a rape, and "I'm sorry ma'am" this is your fractured skull, this is your pancreatic cancer, this is your colon cancer, your uterine cancer, your lung cancer, your prostate cancer, your gigantic spleen which is probably blood cancer, and a lateral canthotomy to give the eyes some room so you don't stop seeing. And they all start to blur together, and it's only work after all, at the end of the day. Stacks of it.

It's very impersonal really if you want to know the truth, and the calling becomes a job for pretty much everyone I think. I don't think I'm the only one, in any event. And the sad thing is when your job loses its nobility. Your working days become like a funeral procession that happens every day, the deceased in the casket is your own self-importance. My boss is my life outside of the hospital. My loves. And if you lose them, if your hospital becomes your home, if you lose yourself in your scrubs, you pray for a miracle, because you desperately need a resurrection.

I'm drinking a cup of coffee and reading about sail boats. I'm reading Ernest Hemingway again. He writes in iceberg style, with deliberate omission. I'm listening to Radiohead, if you want to know. I can't go to sleep, I can't stay awake. I'll call you in the morning. I'm soaking up the last of the shortening dog days, before the trees catch fire, and bleed out all over the ground. I'm in the crow's nest, smelling for ice. Tomorrow I'll go back, down below, down 5 stories and across the country and up a hill. Another sheet in a stack.