Carpe Diem
He was balding and had bad skin. His glasses fell down to the very tip of his nose making him resemble an elf, and he could have been one. Maybe a resentful one, or maybe he was the head leader. The one that’s always just a little bit sad, and he looked like he was in a clay-mation Christmas special.
The specials that always made you smile and feel nostalgic — makes you remember being a kid, and puts you in the spirit. It was early August though, and he grabbed my hand while he asked my parents to leave the room. After they were out of earshot he bent down and whispered “you’re in big trouble kid”, squeezing my hand a little tighter. Then he said “honey, if I were a betting man I wouldn’t bet on you.”
I laughed out loud. I knew it was inappropriate but somehow felt it created this secret bond between me and this doctor and said “I know”. I remember feeling that it smelled comforting where I was and had a flash of the movie Fight Club — where the narrator talks about airlines pumping oxygen into an airplane before it crashes so you’ll be high and unaware.
Maybe this is what they did in emergency rooms too — pumped in oxygen so that whatever news you got you’ll be high and better prepared for the worst. That could explain me not giving a shit at his words. Combined with emptying the bottle of vodka I had brought with me from California right before the drive to the emergency room. I had taken to bringing vodka with me on my jaunts back home and attempts at sobriety. It was a security blanket of sorts knowing it was there in my suitcase to snuggle against as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
I had just arrived the day before — after a red eye, and my mother was late picking me up at the airport. I was pissed. The only reason I was back this time was my parents offer of rehab. I was angry in that just buzzed kinda way, indignant and scorned with meaning and justification. Didn’t she know how sick I was I was? Everybody I know would tell me in quiet desperation to get to a hospital immediately. I was fucking glowing yellow, and my belly was so swollen I could put an Ethiopian from the ‘80’s to shame — but they didn’t know that yet. They didn’t know how bad this was, yet.
Now here I was with the elfin doctor looking down at me and asking me when did I last take a drink of alcohol? I smiled up at him, we had this bond now and said “right before I came, but don’t tell my parents.”
He patted on me on the hand and I descended into a dark unaware vagueness that lasted for over a month. I guess I had finally gotten what I wanted.
“Carpe fucking diem” I said under my breath while toasting the view with my bad coffee and stained grey bathrobe that I wore everywhere.
During those days, I could never shake a chill and no one would talk to me. I don’t blame them, I was a residual yellow and my hair was still falling out. No one would think I was attractive. But, I was well spoken. People would comment on that — my vernacular. Lucas, the brainiac professor with an accompanying PhD in crack told me I had the voice of an angel despite looking like I had just crawled out from under a rock. Lola, the older woman on her third visit here with her track marks shining on her arm like some sort of purple heart for heroin addicts would always nod in agreement. But then again, she was used to nodding.
I also paid attention. I had recently overheard at a meeting somebody say that if you wanted to be happy you had to have your own personal particular way of greeting the day — to make it a ritual. I longed for happiness. So every day for the past 3 months, 13 days, 2 hours and 15 seconds despite the weather, time, exhaustion, or even the irritating rash of unknown origin developing on my right shoulder I made my way to the window at rehab aptly named Vista. I breathed in the view and said aloud “Yes, it’s a great fucking day”. The hope was that eventually with redundancy and an honest attempt at less and less sarcasm, some creative worm of unique profoundness would awaken from it’s cocooned hibernation and tunnel up ferociously from my gut through my throat out of my open mouth and explode in front of me into a singular brilliant one liner that would so seduce the 24 hours ahead with the promise of utter communion, authority, radiance, and that the day would have no choice but to lay down before my door and offer up blossoms and nice breezes. The birds would squawk on whatever path I choose to embark upon.
Repeating “It’s a beautiful day, it’s a beautiful day”, I resigned myself to the odds that today probably was not that promised day. Instead I went to morning group where one person read a daily meditation book designed to evoke epiphanies and platitudes. We all went one by one around the room and discussed it. Lola had saved me a seat. “You read honey, you always read so good” she said while stroking her trophy arm.
When I finally got out of rehab all dressed up and with no place to go I discovered the beauty of errands. The idea of actually going somewhere, to some designated specific place and accomplishing some random goal, no matter how mundane it might seem — replenished me with savvy and direction. Most importantly though a god damn respect and appreciation of time. I had discovered that if I viewed time as an office gift of sorts like an expensive pen set, or a digital phone that could allow you to have conference calls and voice mail or even a stapler with the amazing ability to staple more than 1500 pages at once, a truly realized entity, a real thing who’s identity was based solely on a designated function and meaningful purpose.
My ability to associate the day with meaning and covert pats on the back increased while my proclivity to simply kill, maim, and suck time through the nearest chemical vacuum cleaner within reaching distance significantly dissolved. Of the latter, I knew what would happen should I find myself mindlessly traipsing and skipping around looking for morning glories in the anesthetized cracked landscape of that isolated nation-state in my head.
First, usually, the dullness, expansive and perpetuating, would start to veil me in along with those grey fuzzy borders. My posture would slowly cause me to slump like the little old Chinese lady that lived next door to me. The lack of reactivity and weed-like apathy, sour with bitter aftertaste and vodka, would begin to take on a form apparent. Attached only to me, growing into an almost separate appendage. Useless, heavy and present, akin to those guys who come back from war physically missing an arm or a leg but can still feel the pain. The inexplicable desire to wiggle their absent fingers or toes nonetheless.
I recalled times when this phantom appendage appeared to me so gargantuan and deformed. It seemed like I was unable to walk through a long hallway or sit in a tiny diner restaurant chair. I would inadvertently bump into strangers walking through crowds. Preventing me from even putting on my favorite sweater — the one that even after years of washing still retained the scent of a past love, but could not accommodate my mutant body. It was these times that the prosthetic numbness would begin to kick like a baby. It would start to sprout up tiny and unremarkable at first, but the next time you look has grown to the size of horror version of Jack’s bean stalk. Decayed and filled with smelly rot it would hover and sway over me and create monster-like shadows and block any view of a promising distant horizon.
I used to fear that would be the only growth I would ever know.
