Lonely

            Today I went to the hospital because when I relax my shoulders and lift my chin, you can see a lump on my throat. (Of all the lumps that I have felt there, only this one, the one that doesn't actually hurt, gets attention. You understand, I’m sure.) After paperwork and monetary stress, my wrist was taped into a plastic manacle of information and I was pointed into a room full of chairs and bad television. I had barely settled when someone called, not my name, but a name that is close enough to mine to be entered by an absent-minded professional as my name, and I followed a nurse down a hall and into a room full of equipment.

            She was so kind. I don’t remember her name because I wanted to look at her face, not her name-tag, and it was unusual enough to be immune to sideways glances. She told me everything she was going to do, sometimes more than once. She kept asking me how I was doing. She called me “sweetheart.” She looked at me like her job was to take care of me and only me.

            I don’t know why I had such a strong reaction to her. I wasn’t nervous or worried in the slightest about my health (I think the lump is just a cyst) or the procedure (it was just some pictures) but I felt taken care of and listened-to for the first time in what has felt like years. I even admitted, in conversational tones, as if she cared, that the only thing that I had been worried about was being made to undress. I laughed about how my hands had been trembling from fasting and gratefully accepted apple-juice from her.

            I know this doesn't sound even the slightest bit unusual, but it is for me. We were through in less than twenty minutes, and I didn't want to leave. I shook her hand when I thanked her and I didn't want to let go.

            Now I am at home, paralyzed by things no one wants to hear, trapped between choices no one wants to validate, writing paragraphs straight from a teen-ages girl’s emo diary. Good Lord.

Back

       I've been back in PA for a few weeks now, untangling knots. I tried to write about it before, but I thought that maybe my vehemence was blinding, so I waited. Now I've come back to what I started and finished it.

       I am sitting on a mattress that hurts, in a room that is no longer mine, in a house full of junk, in a place where there is nothing to see or do, and I am angry. I keep telling myself that the world doesn't owe me an instruction manual. I remind myself that no one lied to me on purpose. I point out that I can at least take comfort in that fact that I was right about so many things. None of it helps.

       I can't even have a nice, satisfying rage, because there is no one to be angry at. I can only sit here, stewing in my frustration, trying desperately to have civil conversations about what I am going to do next with people who really love me and deserve none of my muted prickle.

       I'm not disappointed, because disappointment implies that at one time you fully expected something good, and that expectation was somehow dashed. I, on the other hand, have simply returned to a state of desperate longing that was, for a few brief months, lifted hopefully. I am not disappointed. I am back.