Gertrude
I remember Gertrude.
I remember that head of white and paper thin skin, daughter by her side, holding her hand, hands so thin they looked like reeds with a fine mesh of veins cloaking them, she had a loud audible wheeze, barely masked by the low vibration of her nebulizer, producing magic clouds that would help open her airways. The daughter offering quiet comfort to the woman with a failing heart.
She asked for roast chicken. Her daughter looked at her and told her she couldn’t have any. It was too dangerous and that she was to have her puree because that was what the doctors ordered.
Morning ward rounds, we arrive at Gertrude’s bed. Dr Hamilton asks, “How are you today, Gertrude?” She smiles, her eyes gentle and warm, she smiles and tells him she is feeling fine. She tells him this as she is gasping for air, using all her accessory muscles to breath, as she lies on her side, wedged between two pillows as that is the only position she feels comfortable in. Dr Hamilton holds her hand. “Of course you are fine, because that’s just you isn’t it Gertrude? You never complain.”
Gertrude died that very night, she died before she could have roast chicken.
“Death didn’t happen to Steve, he achieved it.”
“We all — in the end — die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.”
9 11
I was in Sydney, at the supermarket with Sharon on one of our weekly grocery jaunts. I recall spending the entire night and morning with Sharon, in our dinky granny apartment taking in news reports on the telly, we were both too shellshocked to sleep.
9 11 2001, was the last time I pulled an all nighter with a friend, much loved, whom I lost to lupus.
9 11 2011 at 1815hrs is the day my Yeh Yeh passed away.
9 11, I’ll never forget.
The gap
I lay in bed last night, under the interrogative glow of my bedside lamp which forced it’s unrelenting questioning upon me, as I battled between finishing the chapter on heart failure and sweet escape from the realities of the day.
The battle must have had a clear victor at some point, because I remember being rudely jolted awake by my book hitting the ground. It fell, between the gap created by my bed and desk. I lay there, my eyes half opened, squinting through the light that continued its interrogation, an interrogation of an early prototype struggling to make sense. I leaned over and looked at my book, splayed out on the floor, defeated.
I closed my eyes but air started to rise up from the gap, it was the book, it beseeched, it begged, it was calling for help, but I could offer it none for I too have been falling into gaps, wedged between two planes, and if I fell again this time, I don’t think I would have been able to pull myself up from the in between.
I stared at the space, and let my hand dangle against the air rising upward, light beating down still, the questioning continued.
I decided, that the interrogation was over.
I rolled over and flicked the switch.
Distance
For some odd reason, I really miss home today.
You’d think after years of practise one should be good at these things.
Mom was right, we all never really leave the womb, the umbilical cord, ever present.
Plod, plod, plod.
All the space without you in it, is empty.
-iwrotethisforyou
The Fire
It is a fire.
An uncontrollable wild raging fire, a sea of auburn ribbons performing an impassioned tango against a shadow puppet screen, casting shadows.
The ribbons!
Their tongues! Their caustic tongues! They lash out.
YOU! they scream YOU! and YOU! They shriek, their shrill cries, the banshees, the ribbons.
They engulf. Their tongues tear through the screen.
They dance, their auburn glow intensifies
BURN! they cry! The ribbons intertwine, twists and turns, flapping wildly in the still air.
The tango, their fancy foot work, comes to a halt.
Silence.
Cinders and fragments, alive, pulsating.
They wait.
They wait for the wind, forming a confluence, waiting to be carried, a cloud of yesterday gone by.
An unrelenting storm, Torrents of water, brings respite to the scorching hot terrain.
It is a fire.
2011
“What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier? Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land”
-Che Guevara
Never let me go
The film adaptation of Never let me go by Kazuo Ishiguro looks like a compelling watch.
“None of you will do anything except live the life that has already been set out for you.”
A predetermined course in life, although in this case one that is of a futile existence, how splendid. Not to have choice, to live as you are told, to live for a purpose.
