Everything All At Once

TW: Scenes of injury and dying

When I walk into a hospital, all I feel is envy. Look at all these injured people. These sick and collapsing people. Life is crumbling. There's nothing more important to them right now than being fixed and getting well. Getting better. Whatever other problems were leaning into them now can be ignored.

They don't have to pay the gas bill today. They don't have to call their grandmother and thank her for the birthday gift. They don’t have to break up with their boyfriends or sign important documents.

Not today.

Today is a free pass. And what do you have to do to get this free pass? You have to hurt. You have to feel pain. You have to be coming undone. Dying. All the things that make hospitals so compelling.

I have walked through the hallways of admission buildings on any college campuses, and they resemble hospitals. But when you go through college buildings, it's a low hum. It's white noise. Everyone there is just a cut out. They are all engaged in worrying and studying and cutting time.

But I can walk through a hospital that has the same linoleum and the same wood paneling and the same numbers on the doors, and I see grief. I see fragile struggles. I see the haggard look of a doctor who's running from one place to another just to give bad news.

There is a television glowing in one room where there is a woman who is propped up in bed, but she's not watching the Price is Right. Her mind is someplace else. Her mind is contemplating the end of existence. How much more interesting is she than the 19-year-old sophomore who has jammed himself into the tiny space under a stairwell with his laptop propped open and his earbuds in his ears? The sick are infinitely more interesting.

The college student is stuck in the present. He is completely enveloped in dry thoughts and ideas that are relevant to him today. He's got to finish a project. The music in his ears becomes pictures in his mind. It's all happening live. He's living it now.

But if I walk past a hospital room where there's somebody wrapped in bandages, I know she's not thinking about downloading apps. She’s not worried about the PowerPoint she's been directed to make for work by Monday. Her bosses are expecting the PowerPoint, but they did not anticipate the crash. No one did. The impact has disfigured her. Her bosses will simply give that job to someone else.

Right before the F150 made a left turn from the center lane, assuming her lane was empty, this woman was thinking that the PowerPoint would be the death of her. And now her death is wrapped around her head. Holding her thoughts.

She's got no space in her brain or in her heart or in her body to think about a PowerPoint. There's no space inside of her to do much of anything but breathe. And she's not sure how much longer she can do that. But even breathing isn't something she's thinking about.

No.

Her thoughts turn to 10,000 memories. 10,000 snapshots. Everything is cascading in front of her. She couldn't possibly pick out the lyrics to a song if she were wearing earbuds. She couldn't possibly come up with a good bid for the showcase. Because she's not present. She is hanging from the tall metal tree. The IV bag is slowly feeding her. The monitors are reminders that this place might be her last. She's no longer connected to her bloody clothes balled up in a plastic bag leaning on a chair in the corner. She's uncovered. Her ghost. Naked from the restrictions real life.

The thumbtack of time is not pinning her to the present. Something happened in the accident, and that thumbtack went flying. She is free to float anywhere in the universe. And that's what's happening. Even if she touches the bandages, she doesn't feel them. Instead, she feels the wounds like a stillborn or a sunburn.

She finds the ocean. She swims out towards the speed boats as an airplane pulls a message in the sky: “Half off all dinners before 4pm.” Half off. Is her face half off? It hurts whenever she tries to float back down into her body. There’s not enough room for her anymore. She’s outgrown it. Her body is not in the sky or the ocean. Her body found the thumb tack. Her body rejects her.

The memory of the truck crumbling the front of her Audi is a slide that sits on top of another slide that has the memory of her grandfather taking her to the mailbox on a Friday afternoon when her parents were at court and he had to babysit her. “I remember,” she says so quietly in her ghost. “It was a quiet walk, but at some point I looked up at him and I told him that I loved him.”

And of course, he told her the same.

There's another slide with the birth of her son. It was a long labor, but this slide is the moment that they placed him on her chest. He was the one who lived. The one whose loud cry made her face crumble into tears. It's funny how you don't mind blood in certain situations. Like now. Her hands are bloody. The blood is dried and caked. She held her son when he was bloody. But he was just starting to breathe. She is running out of that.

There are beeps and tubes and wires and people mumbling. The present state of the emergency room becomes another slide that sits with all the others and when the light passes through them everything of her life gets projected. It glows and doesn’t make sense, but she is drawn to the light. They seem to be on fire. Her memories are tiny portraits of cellophane. Plastic pictures of her past life.

What's remarkable is that she can see everything all at once and it's all so beautiful. Like a painting. Like a trip around the world. And even though all of it sounds like so much noise, she closes her eyes and watches everything for one last time.