When Everything is Dying Beautifully

It’s October and my days are full of terms like CAD, CHF, sepsis, myocardial infarction. I’m learning all about the heart, how it works, what can go wrong, how to treat it. But still, there is so much missing that I cannot learn without experience, without living. I’m starting to feel as though all this studying is causing me to merely understand less about the things that mattered to me once. I wonder sometimes, if this is what my teachers meant when they told me not to neglect my talent. I always thought I could do it all, or that what I was doing was something I wanted. Not that I don’t enjoy nursing and all that comes with it, but I miss reading more than just textbooks. I miss answering more than just the questions that are at the end of each chapter. I miss having time for myself. In all this studying, this learning about things mechanical and tangible I can’t help but wonder, why don’t I ever write anything like this anymore?

2007 | Variegate

It is a brisk, bright, blustery October day, the last of the burnt-red and brown leaves are falling from the tree branches into the agitated wind. Every morning I hear the geese fly over my window along with the airplanes, as though they’re all on a similar flight plan, set out to get far away from here. It’s autumn and days are spent. On these cool days, I feel like the trees out the window, shedding their leaves as though shrugging off their character so that they can start all over again. I used to think they must feel reluctant to change all the time – green to yellow to red to brown – like they must hate all the variation. But that’s what these days are all about. And maybe it’s all this change and prolonged suffering that makes us beautiful. This is a life of making and unmaking. I am like the seasons, temporary, yet a permanent entity in the world

Some Day My Prince Will Come

It’s two in the morning and I have several tabs up of different costumes. Matt and I are discussing what we’re going to be for Halloween. He keeps saying he could just be a farmer since apparently that seemed to work on the ladies. One lady anyway. I told him he should do something else. He wants something he can make at home and I want something that’s nice but doesn’t make me look like a slut. Of course, everyone I know keeps telling me I should dress up as a nurse, and I know they don’t mean I should wear my nursing scrubs. Next, they’ll all be asking for a sponge bath or a free exam. Neither of which I plan on giving.

I scroll through a couple of costumes – giant teletubbies, munchin outfits, batman costumes that cost 500 dollars, prince charming.

“Matt, why don’t you be Prince Charming for Halloween, that would be funny,” I tell him.

“I’m prince charming for 364 days out of the year, I have to be something else for Halloween,” he says and I laugh. But I know that in so many ways he’s got it right. He’s more charming than most people I know, though he’s rather lacking in royalty.

 

Listening to: Got My List | Jonah Matranga

The World Spins Madly On

I am sad today. I am feeling more misunderstood than a teenager going through puberty. I miss Boaz because he’s not here, because he encompasses all the things that have died and gone and I can never get back again. Like innocence, high school, my first set of teeth, and the courage that comes with ignorance. In these moments, I cannot be consoled or figure out how to get back to where I was – happy and hopeful. Instead, I stand in my bare feet, Tracy Chapman singing the same song again and again – I always hold a place for you in my heart—and I spin, I spin like a five year old dreaming of dancing and better things. I spin until I’m drunkenly standing. I spin until I’ve caught up with the world and all is right again.

Let’s Time Travel to Today

 

There is talk about the past and talk about the future, but no mention of the present. It’s as though we are timetravelers, living everywhere but where we are supposed to be.

Sometimes, I want so badly to small again, when life seemed so matter of fact, so full, so endless.

I remember when I was a little kid and my mother took us on a trip to Santa Cruz. It was the first time I went to the boardwalk, the first time I remember staying up so late, and the first time I went on a roller coaster. The roller coaster was called The Giant Dipper and was painted red and white like a candy cane. My brother didn’t want to go on so it was just my mom and I. I was a bit uncertain myself, but then I overheard some teenage boys behind us re-thinking going on. Eventually, one saw me and whispered to his friends, “Come on guys, it can’t be so bad, a girl is going on.” So they all slinked their shoulders and stood in line behind us, me feeling even more grown up than ever. The entire time I was full of anticipation, my eyes wide as I heard people screaming. However, when I got to the end, they told me I couldn’t go, I was too short. I cried and cried all the way walking out the exit. My mother just held my hand and whispered that she’d get me on that roller coaster. She walked in one of the little shops on the strip and in her hand was a pair of platform sandals just my size. So we stood in line again, both of us giggling at our little secret, but still, I wasn’t sure if it would work. When it was finally our turn to get on, I held my breath when he measured me until he gave me a signal that I was good to go. I remember looking at my mom in that moment and thinking that she knew everything, that she’d always be there to help me figure out a way to get through life, even if it meant cheating a little. And I rode that thing all night, with my hands held up and screaming.

In some ways, that’s how I’ll always remember my mother. Proactive, finding a way to fix problems and doing it, living every day with us kids as though we were going to run out of time, not things to do. I wonder to myself when it is we change and how we can become so different, so easily. It’s strange to see her now, always so tired, so busy trying to catch up that she doesn’t have time to live in the present. Now I get to be the one to buy her platform flip flops and show her that we’ll get back on track somehow, because after all, I am my mother’s daughter.

An Eye for Possibility

 

I have spent my summer like it is the only thing of worth I have left—carefully, slowly, stretching it out as much as I can, because when it’s gone, I don’t know how I’ll survive. But it passes anyway me in a standstill as everything else passes me by in lists and holidays.

Today I tried to plan my vacation to Europe and managed to have every ounce of excitement smothered from me when I realised how much the trip is going to cost me. I leave on the 26^th of July and don’t return home until the 17^th of August. I start in England, have a wedding to attend in Sweden and a friend to see in Barcelona. It’s all so much.

I hate that there is no one who will stop me, who will sit me down and tell me how life is, that I have to stop dreaming, stop fighting life. No one says a word, so I keep buying. I keep planning. I keep going everywhere. I keep on believing I can do it all. Yet, somehow, without anyone telling me to stop, something has changed. I feel as though some of the naïve and boundless passion has gone. I write less. I take hardly any pictures at all. And I don’t even draw anymore. There’s just nothing I feel the need to say.

I keep thinking that it might pass, that I’ll wake up one night in a fervor and write until it’s morning in the notebook I keep near my bed.  But it hasn’t happened yet. Instead, I spend my time trying to reclaim my passion in books I once read and loved, but even they fail me, because I cannot go back. I cannot reclaim the person I was a year ago when everything seemed possible, when I felt I could save my family, save my friends, save the world. I can’t go back to when having words was all I needed.   

I can’t help but wonder if it’s okay that I wake up some days and want to do nothing, want to see no one, say nothing. A part of me feels it’s my own way of punishing time and the way it goes faster when you wish it would slow and slower when you wish it would just speed up. Maybe it’s a way of trying to stop getting older, every second, every day. Maybe it’s a way for me to ignore all the things I have yet to do that must be done, that won’t wait for me to catch up when I want or when I’m ready. Because I’m not. I’m not ready. I want to stay right here and that frightens me, because I was never the girl to avoid change. I was never the girl to look forward and be afraid of what might be there. I was always the girl running right into it all, into everything, as though all those possibilities were a pile of lives and I couldn’t help but bury myself in them all, all their colours and shapes, some of them crunching beneath me, others slipping into the folds of my sleeves for me to take home with me.

“I hope you always have your eye for possibility,” a friend told me once. Right now, I feel I’ve lost and if this is what settling feels like I don’t want it. I just feel so very plain and empty. It’s like standing in a room of my own and finding that it was never what I needed, all that space, emptiness, and freedom. Instead, give me children to take care of, places to see, a job to do, chaos to make order of. Give me all the things that make the stories worthwhile. Give me the need to get up in the morning and do something, however frivolous it may seem. I would give anything to have that feeling again, even if it means no longer having a room of my own.

Hurts to Breathe

I’ve spent the last couple of days convalescing, but I feel more like it’s made me go insane. Staying indoors for copious amounts of time was never something I was good at. I was the child you grounded and not spanked, because believe me, it was far more effective. All the same, I’m feeling better, despite the pain in my chest when I breathe, like everything in my life has finally found a way to let me know that I have to learn to let go, or it will all suffocate me. So here I go, letting it all go. Letting go of Boaz and the way I still find evidence of him in all kinds of places, letting go of my mother, letting go of trying to be the perfect daughtersisterfriend, letting go of trying to hide parts of myself I feel might offend people, letting go of myself, letting go of worrying about the future, where I’ll go, who I’ll meet, if I’ll ever find the courage to settle down. Just letting go.  Maybe then I can breathe again, full, deep breaths that take in everything and let it all out again.

Now about Matt, he’s flying in on Saturday and we’re going to spend the next five days lazying around California style, hopefully getting some sunshine in. Some of the people I know find it strange that Matt and I still talk and see one another frequently. I know a couple of friends who are convinced we will end up married at some point, and I don’t know what to say to that. I do think about it sometimes. There’s always Matt and I. We uncovered each other’s lives as though we were excavating for evidence of something before this lifetime—cautious, hopeful, curious. Our imaginations wild with the possibilities. What we found was something better than old skeletons, we found ourselves. And despite all we’ve been through, I could never forget that. So maybe that’s why we still talk on the phone regularly, see each other when we have a chance to, and tell each other everything there is to know about one another’s lives.  

Letting Go of Everything

It’s summer and I cling to these days like a shy child at the playground, holding full fists of their mothers skirt, worried that if they were to let go, they would never find their way back. But they know if they don’t, that they will miss out on so many adventures.

It’s the last summer before I graduate, but really, it feels more like it’s the last summer I’ll ever have. I feel like I should be doing everything I have been too afraid, too shy, too moral, too frivolous, too silly to do in the past. I want to go camping. I want to go dancing in a club with strangers all around me. I want to laugh. I want to drive to the beach in the middle of the night, just because I can. I want to eat strawberry ice cream from a cone. I want to party. I want to have movie marathons. I want to fall in love. I want to let go of everything, including responsibility.

Letters From Kids

Danish Poet

I thought this was cute and funny. It made me miss Scandinavia, or really all my Scandinavian friends. I stumbled upon while procrastinating. Haha.

Let’s Waste Time

 

Monday

• 08:00 to 10:00 – Pharmacology Test & Lecture
• 10:00 to 11:00 – Creative Writing Workshop
• 12:00 to 14:00 – Study for ATI test
• 14:00 to 16:00 – ATI test & Lecture

This is what every day looks like this week. Brackets of time filled in with tests, papers, lectures, pre-lab work and project preparations. My necessities in life have changed from oxygen and food to ATI handbooks and a Davis Drug Guide. I chew on antiemetic medications and cough out respiratory diagnosis. I talk about medical terms in my sleep -MI, prn, stat, SL, Fem-pop. I can’t function without thinking about diabetes or pneumonia or how the asprin I took at lunch is thinning my blood.

I have another test to study for, the last of three. I passed both of the ones I had today and hope to do the same on the next.

I need to write more. Seriously. You think being in a creative writing class would mean I write more. NOT SO.

Oh, look. I’m featured on PUC’s webapge, haha. This is the kind of thing only your grandparents really love. I sent it to them, and what do you know, they printed it out and put it in the fridge. You’re never to old to be put on the refrigerator. Also, this is probably the most amazing basketball shot I’ve ever witnessed.  

Now for studying.