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.