Often I feel as if I live this life like an animal of prey: unsettled, tachycardic, diaphoretic, always waiting for the trap to spring. In the early light of June in the small, thread bare library on the third floor of fourth wing of my little, broke-down hospital I am sitting in sweaty disbelief. Leafing through the pages of my evaluations, a kind of praise and accolades I will never be accustom to, having just been offered a job and an award for which I was never a legitimate candidate, what occurs to me most is that I am loathe to be separated from the pack and that a fall from grace can seem very long and hard when you are afraid of heights.
When it comes to praise I am awkward and inept. I fumble at the strings of my scrubs, flush and tremulous and mutely inarticulate. I press hard against the inevitable, internal reaction of just wait, soon you will realize how little I know, how uncertain I am. I dig in against the urge to run, pressing my nails into the flesh of my palms, wondering always and again, why it was that I was given such an unusual, hard-beating heart.
stockholm syndrome
I came to New York to get my hands dirty, to be in up to my elbows in a mythical urban grittiness. It was to be all gun shot wounds and sweet old men from Russian with poorly defined illnesses from which I would surely nuance a diagnosis. It was going to be big name hospitals in the big, big apple. I would be exhausted and, occasionally, discouraged, but althogether rewarded and balanced, my sanity still neatly intact. I came instead to floors with no sinks and nurses with no mercy and patients with no money, no insurance, no education, no choice. I came to a place where everything was a struggle, a place where I learned to beg, barter and steal. A hospital that demanded I confront my own ill-defined ideas of racism and prejudice and cultural idioms. A population that demanded of me great change and, in exchange, made me infinitely better than I ever predicted.
On my way out, for the last time, through the sticky revolving entrance I turn to the security guard to say goodbye, heavy with everything I have accumulated in a year, and he smiles crookedly at me, nods. Peace out white girl, he says, stay safe. We knock our closed fists together, opening them to grasp each other's fingertips into a soft, sloppy snap (because I'm ghetto now, you see). At the bottom of the circular drive upto the enterance one of the janitor's comes up to me and says you out, mami? Si, I say, I'm done. You be blessed now, you hear? she tells me in the thick Jamaican accent I am certain to miss. You too, I say, and we part ways. She into the cool dim of those fluorescent floors, me into the bright squint of day.
And I am dirty to my elbows. And I am okay, at last, with the stains.
land locked
It's not that I'm unhappy per se, it's just that I miss the ocean. It's just that I miss diving down deep under and coming up to breathe. It's just that I've been homesick for surfing and sandy sunshine and water and ocean. It's just that lately my dreams are like this
