Amen

Hospital time takes over your calendar, breathes minutes into hours and miles into millimeters, when you say you’re coming to sit in that hospital room whether she asks it or not she cries on the line and walks five blocks west instead of east, lost in more ways than one and upended at the Carlyle before realizing her mistake. When she says I just love him so much, what she means is I don’t want to live without him. You begin to crumble and see your own safety nets arrange themselves around you, that you may be able to pay it forward and wrap your own whole safety net around that small corner hospital room. When you say you’re coming back early she cries again and says please come straight here and sit with me. Says if we both die will you take our savings and the kids? When you talk on the phone you laugh, because what else is there to do, but when you hang up, you fall into a pile on the floor, overcome by your trembling body, surprised at your unusual frailty. 

But when he wraps you up in the quiet upstate night, for a moment you think, maybe it will be alright. For a moment you think, you have pulled yourself together before. Now is not the time to fall into piles, there will be time for that yet. Now is the time to do the things unasked, to appear in the spaces where otherwise grows worry, now is the time to hold your breath until a balloon appears in your chest and carries you all the way through to where the calendar can be made right again.