I hate the grey brown film of too-early winter mornings when the sun is far away and faint and pointless and I'm so tired I'd crawl home on all fours except that there's unidentified liquid objects covering the sidewalks and this is the West Village, New York. I hate sleeping during the day. It's not luxurious or relaxing or restorative. I hate drawn blinds and the oppressive thin white light that leaks beneath my eyelids. I hate days lost and dark hours and fluorescent lighting and the full-room sadness of watching strangers ail publicly on narrow plastic hospital beds in the crowded halls of an impersonal ER.
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It has taken about 98 hours of no sleep and dark-night and bad coffee and shift work to loose my soft green sympathy and it winds me how easy it is to turn bitter, grey and grumpy. It is so fucking hard not to loose your whole heart in the hard light of the hospital, with a full board list long full of names but no faces and the off-on-off red lights in the ambulance bays that won't quiet and I am trying to remember to resist it with every cell in my body. I'm trying to remember, but forget more easily day by not-day by day passing. And the nurses are tired. And they are old already, and angry. And everyone around you-me-you is doing it; it's easier to be angry and tired just like cigarettes and coffee is cheap and available and it's really a lot of effort to remain cheerful after being bitten by the woman screaming in her bed, against her handcuffs, against her demons.
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Most of them are intoxicated. Many are cold and homeless. A good number of them are both. They are drunk and broken and smell of their own urine and vomit and blood and folly. If they can speak they do so loudly and are want to repeat the same things. Over. And over. And over. Again. They are the distracting injuries. They are poor historians. They are listed Unreliable. They are the stereotypes and the statistics and, reliability or not, they are predictable, expected, thick in numbers and coherence. Uninteresting and limitless.
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But others are not. Not drunk. Not wasted. Not high. They are not here because of blue-sirens or substances. It is hard to remember about them, the sick and the painful and the sad and the fearful. It is hard to remember about the quietly ailing in the midst of the robustly injured and overtly inebriated. And sometimes, just for a moment, I will stop, when I forget to care that others are looking, and focus in on one. On the old man, fragile, delicate, dying, in the corner by himself, grasping his tubes of oxygen, taking it all in, looking out from the middle of the end of his life and I realize: this is what he sees:
strangers, exhausted, angry, caught up in the mechanisms of our own lives, our small annoyances, our short tempers, our own imperfections.
.
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It is usually and often more than I can hold on to, it usually and often takes my breath away, it usually and often renders me tiny, empty, pale and powerless.
I hate days lost and drawn blinds and the thick film of sleep on my skin. I hate waking up in the evening, feeling bit by bit by bit, my soft green sadness flaking off, leaving behind a hard center: dull and grey and unrecognizably familiar.
