The turquoise cave

I look upward to a pale blue break in the rocks overhead. Too far away to reach.

There is a funny feeling one gets inside a cave. Even though the rough stones that surround me do not touch my skin, I feel their touch orbiting me like an unwelcome caress. My guts wiggle their uneasiness.

The daylight entering the cave produces an aqua aura glow. I am hypnotized. I notice around me swarms of silver and turquoise treasures embedded in the crusty rocks. Higher and higher up, the jewels sparkle that intercept the entering beams of light.

Turquoise stones are said to endow the wearer with friendly regard, luck, protection and power. Turkish soldiers were the earliest to carry this charm; first attached to their bridles to prevent falls, and then to their own bodies as its properties gained a reputation for protecting against any injury. In crystal healing, turquoise is utilized on the Third Eye and the Throat Chakra to open the channels of intuition and enhance communication. I like to wear turquoise because I think it’s really pretty.

The desire to slip just one little ring onto my finger is overwhelming. I reach out in robotic duty to my impulse. Just when I’ve brought my hand close enough to the wall, the ring slips out of my reach. I try again. I shiver awake. My sweat has dampened the scratchy white sheets encasing my body. I begin to cry.

It is a humbling thing to whimper in front of a stranger. Though it is only my first night in the hospital, my pathetic heaving cries have already mortified me to the “sitter” assigned to supervise my every move. She sits beside my bed all night and helps me to the potty when I need it.

“Hey? Are you cryin, girl? Why you cryin’ girl?”

“I’m fine!”

Oh, God. She noticed. Please, please go back to watching a show on your Galaxy. I need this from you, I tell her in my head.

“Why you so sad?”

I don’t know what she makes of my refusal to answer these questions. I don’t know why I can’t answer them, either.

“I’m fine. I’m okay. I’m just sad.”

I roll over to signal my unwillingness to chat and feel a tug at my wrist. A sensitive place there connects me to an IV machine. How could I forget?

When she comes back from her next break, the sitter stands over me with her pregnant belly sticking out like a lollipop. She starts talking.

“I don’t know what you been through, honey, but I can guarantee you I been through worse. But I pray to God and hope that things will be better. It can always be worse.”

I can’t tell where she’s from based on accent alone, but maybe it’s Nigeria. I am so furious with her for invading my solitude that I’m unable to speak. I wonder who the hell gave her the job of suicide watch.

At six the next morning, a shrill-voiced nurse parades into the room. I’m already awake because the lady on the other side of the curtain has been up asking for Benadryl and ice. I don’t mind because she’s on dialysis and I just want her to be comfortable. We watch Donald Trump at the RNC on separate televisions. Neither of us can use the bathroom alone.

The nurse meets my eyes with friendly alertness. It doesn’t stop me from wanting her to go away, though. I wade through our introduction like an annoying stream. But she has a duty of care, and for her that means getting to the root of the problem.

“Why did you take so much medicine?”

“Because I wanted to sleep.”

“Oh, you wanted to sleep? You took too much. You took a lot of medicine. That can actually hurt you. It can kill you.”

“I know.”

“Did you mean to hurt yourself?”

“Yes.”

She doesn’t have much to say after that, just mostly how I shouldn’t have tried to hurt myself. Everyone here thinks it’s so simple, don’t they? And I’m no help, laying here wordless, letting them say what they will.

I order breakfast on the phone. By the time it arrives I’ve fallen back into the cave dream.

First blog post

“But who will read it?”

My friend Ilene wants me to be a librarian. She sees herself in me because she was an English major. She was a librarian in Queens for some time, she tells me. The benefits are great and it’s interesting work.

I nod. It’s important to be polite to people. I smile because I love her.

Ilene has a blog. I guess one day a lady on her flight to Ireland suggested the idea, then she went ahead and did it. But by the time I met her last summer, the glamour of airing her written word on the internet had waned. She is more anxious in her seventies than she used to be, I bet. And she is certainly very dizzy sometimes. Her only son has a newborn and she doesn’t want to be a burden.

“I tried the vistaril last night. It worked really well and I’m not even groggy today. Maybe you could try that one?”

“Well they gave me that seroquel and it hasn’t been doing anything.”

“I tried that one too for a while but it wore off. I feel like they just give that to everyone.”

I wanted to give her hope that something might make her feel better. She needed to rest. Ilene was the first person I talked to when I arrived at the inpatient unit. She asked me where I went to college. I felt embarrassed. I described my Wellesley College Spanish/English double major. I sensed her communion in the love of words. She said she had started a blog.

We talk about the blog a lot. The clear morning after my anti-histamine aided rest, I was especially interested in conversation. It tickles me when I get to chatting. I love to laugh easy, to let somebody sigh their troubles. I like to share my cigarettes with strangers. Ilene wouldn’t have smoked even if we were allowed, but we could have gone for a cup of caffeinated coffee for a change. Something to wash down the foamy scrambled eggs at least.

I say I think her blog must be a lot of fun.  I say she has a lot of interesting experiences to put in her blog. She agrees through tears that quiver in the corners of her eyes. She sighs. She says, “But who will read it?”

Sometimes when I think about that moment, I get stuck. The vulnerability of that worry is like quicksand. It’s like a drag off an American Spirit yellow. Who will remember what I said and did?

Mostly, though, I think if I say nothing and do nothing, no one will remember it. I’ve been wanting to write a blog for a while. I’m not sure where it will take me but my hope is that it will be a journey where I can reflect and maybe even connect with you through my experiences of the world. Here goes nothin’!

Thanks for joining me…

xo,

Jami

Evening in Butcher’s Hill, Baltimore, 9/2016