Don't Sneeze

“They found you in the parking lot behind Panera,” my sister said, standing beside my hospital bed. 

I wasn’t sure what she wanted me to say—this wasn’t even my darkest moment, far from it, just the only one her and my mother were privy to, because Frank was up in Michigan—so I just said, “Oh.”

“I guess the drive-thru worker was taking orders and noticed you laying there on the ground and called 9-1-1. And she saw your shirt and figured you worked next door, so she went and told them so that they could call your emergency contact, but it was Frank, and he didn’t answer.” I didn’t look her in the face, but I knew she was proud of her little Nancy Drew detective skills. “I don’t even know how Brian got my number, but he called me around eight last night.”

 I vaguely remember my friend apologizing, “I’m sorry, but I had to call your sister. I didn’t know what else to do.” I wasn’t sure how he knew I was at the hospital, or why he had come, but I had been angry at him.

“Anyway, I went to your work, and was just kind of asking, feeling out what happened, and the girl who was working said that she worked with you yesterday. She said that you seemed fine, you were speaking clearly but kept repeating the same thing and that you couldn’t stand up straight.” She paused again, presumably waiting for me to either explain or graciously thank her for prying into my life, like it interested her so intensely now that there was drama, even though she hadn’t given two shits for the past five years. God, why couldn’t she just leave it all alone. “Anyway,” she continued, “I told them that you had a seizure, so you should be able to call them and explain.” 

Maybe I was being a bitch and didn’t understand that she was covering for my drunken ass that couldn’t even walk home in the middle of the afternoon, but I just wanted to curl into nonexistence. “Thank you.” I scraped my teeth over my peeling lips.

I felt my mother’s pinched aura from the other side of the room. I knew she ached to lecture me, to let me know how much pain I’d been causing her, how she just couldn’t understand what was so terrible about my life that I required drugs and alcohol. What pain was I trying to dull? I wish I understood it myself, but it wasn’t as if there was some huge defining moment that made me snap; it was more of a death-by-a-thousand-needles situation, and I knew she wouldn’t understand.

“Do you have Chapstick?” My sister was already digging through her purse, and almost immediately produced a pale-pink tube. She pulled the cap off, twisted it up, and bent over to gently glide it across my lips. When she finished, she put it on the rolling, bedside table next to the flowers my mom had brought and then went over to sit beside her. They chatted to each other about my nephew’s school and Pinterest recipes, as I stared at a muted TV that only seemed to have either wildlife programs or cooking channels. 

They left when the doctor came in. My sister bent to hug my limp body, and my mother kissed me square on the lips. She would cry in the car as she drove home. 

“Hello, Sydney,” the doctor said once they were out of the room. “Do you know where you are?” 

Hell. “The hospital.”

“And do you know why you’re here?”

Because I hadn’t slept in a week and was all different kinds of cross faded. “I hit my head.”

He tapped his tablet, then held it down between both hands and looked at me. “Yes, you took a substantial blow to the head.” At this he cleared the space between us and bent over to examine the left side of my head. “Are you in any pain?”

I told him no, because I wasn’t. Not physical at least. The side of my head felt dull and tight. I’d seen my face that morning, the bloody pulp if a mass that had once been my eye was disfigured and swollen, with four strings sticking straight out from my eyebrow line where there were stitches, but no, it did not hurt. I told him as much.

He proceeded to tell me in nauseating detail the damage I had sustained: a concussion, to say the least, a hair line fracture going up my skull, and several fractures to the bone beneath my eye. At this, he told me that it was imperative that I not blow my nose or sneeze, as that could cause the bone pieces to fly apart and my eye could slip down into my cheek, like some sort of rotting zombie, losing its composition. 

I nodded and was happy to have him gone. 

I was in the hospital for five days after that, and every day someone came into my room to ask me the same questions about my location, the reason, sometimes throwing in curve balls like, who’s the vice president or what sounds do cows make. On the fourth day, the nurses and techs were all bound and determined that I was going to take a shower. They must have set up a rotation to come and harass me, because once an hour on the dot it seemed, one of them would come into my room with towels and soap to try and coax me into the shower. Despite blood being caked into my hair and an alcoholic stench emanating from my orifices, I always refused. 

My mother came every day before lunch and sat on the couch for about an hour. We didn’t speak much, and she always left when my food came. Frank didn’t call me until the third day, saying that he figured I needed my rest. And I suppose by then, I was surprised he’d called at all. He told me he loved me, that he missed me and that he was worried about me. I called bullshit on all three. 

He’d been in Michigan for three months, supposedly building a life for us, but somewhere along the line it felt as though he had forgotten about the me in the us. Watching movies together over the phone, turned into quick good-night calls before bed, which disintegrated into good-morning texts which eventually devolved into nothing at all. He was always tired from work, but not too tired to play three pick-up hockey games a night or play D&D with his friends, and somewhere in all that I drifted into the forgotten, out-of-state accessory of his life. The month it was supposed to take him to move me up with him was dragging into an entire summer, and I was beginning to wonder if he wanted me with him at all. 

The last time I saw the doctor was the morning before they discharged me. He came into the room sans tablet. “This is going to be a sensitive topic,” he said, casting his gaze over at my mother, “If you would like to speak alone.” My mother left, and he took her seat in the plastic cushioned chair. “You can’t live like this. You won’t live past forty if you do.” The talk that doctor gave me created a dull sort of itch that kept me sober for about a week. Until I was back in my apartment, alone, with nothing but walls to whisper to and no one willing to come over and visit me except my drug dealers.                

A few years later, some masochistic, shits-and-giggles curiosity would have me reading over the summary of my stay in the hospital, and at the very bottom of the doctor’s notes, there was this quick little blurb: “Monitor for depression.” And I let out a single, whopping laugh, because I was depressed. I was not an abused child, but my mother had given me a black eye, and my father had kicked me in the butt. I was not neglected but was somehow always overlooked in the wake of successes or needs of my siblings. Men loved me, but only in as much as I fulfilled something vacant in themselves. I was good at school but never praised, because it was expected of me. I was a good bartender, but my cheeks grew weary from the strain of a fake smile. 

My soul was a cesspool of neutrality, and I longed to feel something. 

 An inextricable depression was soaked into my very being, and I did not feel monitored. Hell, I didn’t even feel seen. People drifted in and out of my room and my life, with casual how-do-you-dos, and sometimes slight jabs without so much as a second glance. Now that I was hard to look at, why would I expect them to act any differently. That’s the thing about suffering—you tend to look away, the same way you look away from gushing wounds and scenes in movies when bones snap. Not that it would have mattered, because, as my sister said, “No one can really help you, until you’re ready to help yourself.”

But like the crimson ball of snot sitting at the top of my nose, I felt like there was something festering inside, something that I so desperately wanted to remove, but couldn’t. Everyone was telling me they didn’t know why I was doing this to myself, crying about how my life had disintegrated and how sad it was, because I had so much potential, without once copping to the fact that perhaps they played a part in my self-destruction, all while screaming at me “don’t sneeze, don’t you fucking sneeze,” while I sniffled on the precipice of change. I knew I’d feel better if I could just sneeze, if I could just get the glob of goop out of my nose. If I could just scream out all the tiny ways I’d been wronged, about all the seemingly insignificant things that had compiled to create this threadbare soul that needed medicinal courage just to smile.  

At some point, I wondered why bother. I’d come this far, choked down the suffering for this long. I might as well see this path to whatever end. So when Brian knocked on my door, I answered, and when he handed me two bottles of wine, I drank them, sinking deeper and deeper into the frayed, faux-leather couch that had become my drunken throne. “Ink Masters” played on the TV, and he sat beside me, rolling blunts that he’d light and pass over, and I thought how this was actually a tame night. 

See? I was getting better. I didn’t have a problem. I just needed to tone it back. Just like Frank had said in the past two years whenever I broached the topic of sobriety with him, because sobriety for me meant sobriety for him.

But the next morning, with the same guilt-ridden hangover I’d become accustomed to, I sent a couple texts, and by early evening, I had another man standing on my doorstep, with a baggie I knew was tucked in his pocket and a grin on his face that I also knew would be asking for more than just a quick Bengamin. And while I leaned over the couch, and he slid his hands around my hips, I thought about how wrong Frank had been, telling me that I needed to “get in shape,” if I was ever going to make any money from Only Fans, because look, see, men find me desirable.                

He had pushed my head against the couch, and when I was able to sit back up, there were smudges of dark blood streaked across the leather. I went to the bathroom to make sure my eye was still in place. It was, and I stuck my finger up my nose to the second knuckle to pick at the snot. It would not budge, solidified against the tender skin of my nostril.

Frank did finally come for me, but not before I told him that I would not be going with him to Michigan. Somewhere in my gut, I knew that if I went with him, I’d die. And while that didn’t seem like such a bad scenario, I wasn’t quite sold on it yet. 

I guess he didn’t really come for me; he came for the last of his stuff. He tsked and tut-tutted at the state of the apartment, telling me that I needed to get help, but all the times before when I told him I needed help, he’d told me that I was fine, that I didn’t have a problem, because then I would have been his problem. Now that I was no longer his, he made sure to point out all the problems I would be bearing by myself. 

I watched him drive the U-Haul away from the apartment and felt the creep of a sneeze deep in my soul. It would be another year before I could finally blow out all the anger and angst that resided in me, but that was the beginning tingle that I knew I only had to let it sit at the edge, making sure not to look up or say “watermelon, watermelon, watermelon,” making sure to in no way deny it.   

I wish I could say it was a clear-cut line to sobriety, but it was not. I first had to regain my will to live, and to get that back, I had to find a reason to live. But much like the snot my body had created, I had allowed my anger to fester long enough to develop into a deep seeded poison that was killing me. Not everything in my life was wrong because of me, but I had created all the reasons why they were wrong, and it wasn’t until I realized that that I was finally able to claw my way over the brimstone and out of hell. 

It’s been nearly four years now since the accident, and I watch my nephews and niece on Wednesdays, shop with my mom on Sundays, do laundry on Mondays, meal prep on Tuesdays, and somewhere in between I hang out with a guy who wraps me in his arms and tells me that he’s proud of me, and that he’ll never intentionally hurt me, and how could he?  When you’ve done all the hurting yourself, there’s not much else anyone can do. 

And now that I know what my sneezes feel like, and my face is healed, my soul is healed, I can sneeze my poisons out whenever I want. 

Whenever I need to.