Juxtapose

This morning, upon awakening, I was greeted by a KingSize headache and a nose completely clogged up to the point of no return. My throat is sore, I sound like a donkey, and my lips are cracked, presumably, from sleeping with my mouth open. I got up, took a shower, then, setting my alarm for an hour later, at 9AM, went back to bed. And slept until 12:15. After I finally got up to the meeting (which I did not miss, thankfully) I went to meet Mark up at work to grab a coffee after the meeting was over. We had a nice peaceful walk to the Dunkins down the block on the main drag of the city. When we finally got to Dunkins and finally ordered our coffees (after the Dunkins guy got it wrong the first time), we had just sat down to eat when Mark heard somebody yell out of our line of sight. Being mostly deaf from stuffed up ears and sinuses, I didn't hear anything, and when Mark got up to see what was going on and I followed him, I found a well-dressed and pretty, well made-up woman convulsing on the floor in front of the counter, her friend or boyfriend speaking her name repeatedly and holding her head as she bucked. Another man in an Indiana Jones hat was crouched by her torso and I kneeled towards her feet to get a look into her eyes and pull her legs out from the gap between the counter and the floor, her heels slapping the tile over and over again.

When I asked if she had ever done this before, had a seizure before, the boyfriend said no. Dunkins boy, at this point, had gone outside and was talking on the phone. He came back in and it sounded like he was on the phone with the manager of the store, but when I asked, he was, in fact, calling 911. The operator was asking questions he didn't know the answer to, and when I asked if he wanted me to talk, Mark said, trying to be helpful, "She's a nurse!" This, of course, made me nervous, knowing that people were going to ask what to do, and knowing that as emergency first aid issues go, seizures are one of those things that you can't do much about besides making sure the person doesn't get injured by their own spasticity and making sure that if it's the first time they've had one, that they get medical follow-up. Dunkins boy didn't hear me, apparently, but instead answered the operator as best as he could. The man in the hat kept saying "She's unresponsive!"

I felt very sad, in that instant. Sad that there was nothing I could do and sad that this poor woman was now surely headed into the dark world of multiple CAT scans, MRIs, brain studies, and the like. Her boyfriend said, "She was under a lot of stress... maybe that's what caused it...?" But I didn't know. I have seen seizures before, multiple times within the hospital and once involving a classmate with epilepsy who had auras and told people that she was going to have one shortly. All these situations required minimal intervention besides safety and placing them in the recovery position. I'd time the seizure, and if they needed their dilantin, so be it, it was there to be used if necessary. But for those people, this sort of thing happens all the time. For this poor girl, there was nothing to do but wait for the ambulance and hope that it stopped before five minutes long.

Suddenly, there were all sorts of stupid-looking people standing around and staring that had come into the place while the action was going on. They didn't help at all, and one lady even stood by the counter, as if ready to order. Dunkins boy stated, in a nervous voice, that he had to stand outside to wait for the ambulance, so, "Uh.. it's just that I'm not going to be able to get anyone any coffee right now or anything..." I sent Mark out to watch for ambulances and Dunkins boy stood and looked more nervous.

Her face lolled towards me, her seizure subsiding, her throat compulsively swallowing multiple times, her pupils dilated and her lips leaking foam, and as we rolled her over onto her side, I wiped off her cheek and put my scarf between her head and the floor. She nodded at our questions in slow motion, her pulses at warp speed. The ambulance finally came, three minutes later, and I stepped back to our table to let people do their job. She finally sat up with help and was ushered out, sleeping, on a stretcher, her boyfriend clutching her purse and jacket and, sweetly, my only-recently knitted and very, very soft scarf.

Life is about moving around in space and time and matter, molecules bumping into one another and cells knitted together in a shell of skin. We're here and then we aren't. God persists. Time persists, in a way, but not in all ways. And then, every once and a while, while we're moving around through the invisible existence of the air we breathe and displace as we walk, we leave little pieces of ourselves behind. Like a scarf that ends up in the hands of someone completely different than it started in. There is no telling what a day may bring. Kiss the ones you love. Serve the Lord your God with every breath. Life is quick.

If only I could live out my own words.

Mrowrrr. Happy Thanksgiving to ME!!!

Life is busy, times are good, I am loved and employed and well fed and very, very content.

I work, I come home, I clean my house and kiss my Mark when he returns from work and I'm not sure what I did before all this. School is no longer a part of my life and I wonder how it went so fast. Instead of thinking on this too long, I snuggle up into my blankets and warm myself with tea and my feet on the steaming baseboards. Such a funny life, really. I know this is the nature of everything in my life right now, that is, being married for not quite a year, working a new job that pays well, having no kids and no real pressing responsibilities other than paying our bills and reading our Bibles. But even so, even with all those funny little things, even with the late nights and opposite work schedules and long commutes, I am just enjoying so much this quietness and calmness and sweetness. Life is cozy and interesting.

Mark makes me laugh a million more ways than I could ever count, I bend over backwards to do the stupid silly things that make him laugh, forgetting everything I've ever vowed to myself I would not do to make a boy happy. I guess what I'm saying is that I thought I loved Mark when I married him. I even thought I loved him when he first asked me to date him, but I didn't know, didn't have any idea the potential or the catalyst that marriage could be. I mean, I just did not know how much more I could love him over time. I loved him romantically, I loved him as my friend. But now, I just don't know. I love him in some funny other way that just feels like home. He is home, my other half. Like I'm not sure how much Whole there could have been before him.

Like I said, content.

A few minutes ago, after I took out my little potroast from the fridge and nestled it lovingly among some potatoes and onions in the crockpot, I spent a few minutes relaxing with a lit book I had for the second college class I took back in the day, when I was but a wee child, really. In it, I found wonders of poems I hadn't read in literal years, probably not since I took the class in 1998. So much of the book is crappy - multicultural doublespeak and essays trying too hard to prove a point, with none of the beautiful, gentle subtlety of words that makes language so versatile and wonderful. But amongst the over-verbose rambles and brambles of some pages, I re-discovered some really incredible poetry and prose. The poem I'll leave off with was one of my favorites at the time I first read it, maybe because it's beautiful but still quite a bit morose. I find myself, even today, stunned by the simplicity and quietness and beauty of the words, the haunting sadness, almost as if a mountain man, in simple, quiet honesty, were telling it himself. These are the things that make me curl up inside, on my quiet couch in my quiet house, smelling the curls of cookingsmells from my kitchen and loving the whole and entirety of life.

"Mountain Bride"

They say Revis found a flatrock
on the ridge just
perfect for a natural hearth,
and built his cabin with a stick

and clay chimney right over it.
On their wedding night he lit
the fireplace to dry away the mountain
chill of late spring and flung on

applewood to dye
the room with molten color while
he and Martha that was a Parrish
warmed the sheets between the tick

stuffed with leaves and its feather
cover. Under that wide hearth
a nest of rattlers,
they’ll knot a hundred together,

had wintered and were coming awake.
The warming rock
flushed them out early.
It was she

who wakened to their singing near
the embers and roused him to go look.
Before he reached the fire
more than a dozen struck

and he died yelling her to stay
on the big four-poster.
Her uncle coming up the hollow
with a gift bearham to days later

found her shivering there
marooned above a pool
of hungry snakes,
and the body beginning to swell.