There was a bit in the last section that I’d like to reclaim. I used the word “frightened” to describe myself in the moment when I saw my mom and dad’s faces for the first time and subsequently interpreted their appearance as a symbol of how dire things were for me. I don’t think that’s right. I don’t believe that I ever felt scared, or frightened, or sad, or angry, or anything that a healthy person would probably have been feeling throughout this. Inside me, there was only this: a static indifference. It was like a white noise, like a box fan being run at higher…
Everything around me in the hospital was cast in a kind of perpetual, shimmering twilight. Sounds fruity to say that, but it’s true. It would be twilight as I was falling asleep; I’d wake up and it would somehow still be twilight. No matter what time of day it was, the shadows were always long and dramatic in St. Paul’s, the sun outside always seemingly close to going down. I didn’t understand it then, but I was becoming more and more untethered to time. I was leaving behind the things that normally bound me to the world—clocks and calendars and the Internet and so on. I…
My third visit to the Emergency Room at St. Paul’s was even more of a blur than my two blurry earlier visits had been. Jason, my friend, as his wife Ali who is a medical doctor had instructed him to do, shepherded me there, though I have no memory of him doing so. I don’t remember many tangibles from this visit—no faces, names or anything like that. I remember sitting in a small curtained-off room by myself for awhile. I remember doctors and nurses wheeling a series of odd-looking machines through the curtains, as if these were prizes I’d won on a dour gameshow. They cheerily hooked me…
