"A Relatively Simple Procedure"

Downtown Chicago Apartment/September 24 2007

HIM:

I woke up shortly after 5 the next morning, in a fog from all the drugs, the strange dreams and the pain. Outside I could hear the rain making splashes on my window, the downtown early traffic already building up to a steady chorus of blaring horns, emergency vehicle sirens and screeching tires. I wondered if had my life been any different, would I be out there in the rat race with the rest of them, they who know not the difference between night and day? Because they work all day, and then at night they play. I also wondered if I should get up and try to get presentable. I had had to get my sutures re-done the day before in what was supposed to have been a ‘relatively simple procedure’. As it turned out Dave had to leave work and bring me home; nauseous, heavily drugged and mad at the world. As I fought the morning confusion laying there in the dark, in the same clothes I wore to the hospital the previous day, I wondered why I felt like she had been around. I’d started to think about her less over the last few years, not out of choice. Mostly out of an effort to self preserve. Because all the thinking I had been doing was slowly killing me, just not fast enough to spare me another round of chemotherapy, radiation therapy and the occasional card from a person in the office that said ‘get well soon’ as if the whole thing was an ironic joke to freaking cheer me up. “Get well soon”-how sensitive, that choice of words. I started to loosen the one button that had remained when I realized that this was the shirt she had given me when I turned 23. Not that it still mattered, but for some reason I did not take it off. I slept again around seven, I blocked out the rain and the thought traffic in my brain and I dreamed. Of her. Again.