cluttered heart                                           

I used to think that melancholy was a byproduct of being younger, leaner, less steady with our compasses, all the terrain in front of us uncharted; a direct metabolite of intentional disillusionment and green ache. I used to think I would out grow it, some day, like shoes. And I would keep it around as artifact, like a tumor taken out and put into jars, to show to myself: look, look at that, you used to carry that around with you. As if I were cured. 

Driving the green miles of my new roads in New Hampshire, surrounded once more by big, empty beauty, quiet finally inside, something comes on the radio and I am suddenly, unexpectedly nostalgic. And it is a hard grasp to see that I have come so far from there, that I have already gone so long, when sometimes nothing on the inside seems changed. And just like that, in the middle of my life right now, I'm back again and younger, drunk on liquor and life and cigarettes, looking up at the sky, mending a fragile heart, counting stars.

low definition 

My mother in law sends me this as a link from The New York Times and immediately I am angry. I am angry and annoyed and small childish. Because this is my life, in a nutshell, although in some ways even less glamorous and more chaotic, as this is not my hospital. My hospital does not have translators, or computers or sinks. My hospital is even more poor, even more dense, even less dazzling. To write up an article on the hospital I work in would be to outline an exercise in failure, a fall out of our humanity. 

And I am angry. I am angry because never has she asked about what I do, what my day is like, since it is unattached to Important Names and Things To Brag About. Because all New York is about, at this level, is attachment to Enormously Important People and if you are not attached, well...  I am angry because I have, for the past two years, bounced between both upper sides of Manhattan and the underserved in Brooklyn and the stark contrasts have made me schizophrenic. I am angry because as I share meals with them, they laugh and roll their eyes, as if we were talking about a stain on a shirt somewhere that won't come out; as if it were nothing less than a nuisance and when will I learn to choose a better cleaner? As if to say it is somehow my fault, or my patients. I can almost somehow hear the word that's what you get for working in the ghetto. And I am consumed by undifferentiated rage.

And since I am passive aggressive and an impostor of a New Yorker, I send her an email back. I want to say "goddamn you for only paying brief attention because someone finally got it together to write an article about it in The Times. Goddamn you for being so specifically clueless. And goddamn you for rubbing it in my face". But I do not. Instead I write something terse and childish like, Now you know what my life is like every single day. Minus the computers, the translators and the sinks. And yes, my patients are also very, very sick. 

Because I am ill-equipped to live like this.