Must be some kind of way out of here
I have decided that there is no past, nothing to talk about, that I have detached myself from it, have jumped off the side of memory into the deep, into the ever-present now.
There will be no more conversations about the cold hospital room at Georgetown and how the phone lines didn’t work, the frantic call earlier in the day from my mother to get out and the way my coworkers and I didn’t know where to go and gathered around a Capitol Hill fountain under a searing blue sky before walking home, the forced march with the others, and the rumors flying about bombs and planes intermingling with the truth.
I don’t want to discuss dead pets. Or the way K had a way with the rhetorical knife. Or the summer the three of you spent on Smith Island, sunburned under dead sky, the fights about evolution and carpentry, the way the ice cubes melted in the glasses of gin and tonic, and the son sat quietly, protected but not, because we know now that his reticence was a permanent condition, not something stuck to childhood.
We agree on the facts, most of them, and we share the history, and it is not comforting to me now as it gets further and further away. The main characters are dead. They have moved to distant states with people we've never met. We shared houses once and meals and sometimes conversations, and there were summers of entwined limbs or afternoons on the damp couch with the paperbacks, and the road shimmered in the heat. I am in the dark now, in the waiting room (so many times this comes up, the waiting room) and if I look back, I am afraid I might get stuck.
On that day almost ten years ago, I walked home. I made sure my boyfriend, who was at a meeting in northern Virginia, was ok. In the surreal beauty of a Washington DC September afternoon, he and I walked to the hospital. It was one of the last “normal” afternoons for K, although the world was changed from the outside, soon to be changed from the inside. Then it was bleeding and ventilators and tubes shoved down K's throat. It was traches and Factor VII and anthrax and for one week I had “All Along the Watchtower” going through my mind when we thought K was going to die. He was, but it was months away, and everything was burning.
Before that it was sickness. Before that, anger mixed with talk. Neglect tempered with love. Insanity, insanity, and I detach myself from that. But I am just detached right now and I hate it, I am searching in the dark for a path, making sure that it takes me forward, not back into the muck and if I am not careful I will spend every moment lost, in tears, holding it together so tightly I destroy myself, wondering how the story will end.
From the prompt "Ten years ago."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image by lost in pixels.