* Remembering the image in my head ~ the memory ~ before I write it down is a sacred form of writing before the writing exists. A beckoning to relive, flashing in and out of the body. I wish I could reproduce my brain’s blooming of events, but they are just mine. Reproduction is for other people. Sometimes I swear I will never write about something, but that is usually what I want to write about most. I want to write about the girl alone in the ICU waiting room and the man in the curtained-off room with the swollen face attached to tubes. I don’t know anything about them besides the image. I want to write about my dad attached to wires in the ICU to look at his brain waves and then we brought our own wires to play music, Bob Dylan songs, in his ears like a stream of hope. A calling, a comfort, a determination, for us more than for him. After all, the music was too harsh for his mind. Sometimes it’s hard to admit that music is painful. I remember listening to “Simple Twist of Fate” on the plaid couch, and I haven't been able to listen to it since. Sometimes when I think of words before I write them, I start to cry, but then when I write them in the physical space outside my invisible imagining, they don’t pull me down into their waters anymore. The words float at the top, harmless. The words inside my thinking of the writing are more painful than the physical written outcome. Outside my body, the images neutralize -- white wires and earbuds lifting into my dad’s ear. A girl watching tv on a chair in a dark room with other chairs. A room for families to wait, a transition area for the attached, where my sisters and I talked about details of our private lives. Why not tell each other who we really are? We could die never knowing each other except for the image.
my grandma was nurse in TB units in STL in 1940s (?). She still alive, she 93-94 (?) stays in her retirment condo in sunny lemay ferry MO. <3