Romance is on a respirator, hooked up to a few IVs and pissing into a tube. A little machine next to Romance beeps steadily, and a larger one hums.
Someone leans over Romance and talks into its face. “Do you know where you are?”
Romance doesn’t know where it is. Romance isn’t even sure what day it is. It can’t talk, anyway, as something plastic is jammed down its throat. It can’t feel its feet or its hands and its chest feels heavy, like his lungs are full of ballast. Romance blinks quietly. The little machine continues to beep. There is low talking somewhere outside, muffled and distorted.
“You’re lucky to be alive,” someone with a chart tells Romance. “That was some accident.”
Romance isn’t dead, but it can’t move. It sucks in air through the plastic tube and squeezes its eyes closed.
“Can you hear me?” The little machine is beeping faster. The muffles voices are inside now, but they still sound distorted. “We’re going to give you something for the pain.”
Romance keeps its eyes closed and waits for the pain to go away, waits for its lungs to open back up. But the pain doesn’t subside; Romance just rifts off into a drug-induced slumber.
Romance isn’t dead.
Romance remembers everything. Like a dream sequence in a movie, Romance remembers itself. It traces back the years in a morphine-drenched hallucination that smells and tastes and continues to beep.
It remembers Valentines Day at a small school desk and the soft construction paper feel of the pink heart that sat on it. Romance held the card up to its nose and smelled the waxy crayon scent, better than gluey stickers, better than the grape-fragranced markers or the woody colored pencils.
It can feel the sun block smeared on its bony shoulders by someone else. It retraces the fingers up the back of its spine and under its straps. The sun beat down regardless and Romance was still burned.
Romance went running with someone during a thunderstorm in college, through the quad and the parking lot and stopped outside the dorm to slide wet, rainy kisses across faces. It tastes like damp grass and cigarette smoke.
It remembers lying in the dark in someone else’s bed, laughing at everything though nothing was funny. It remembers sharing an orange in bed, segment by segment, watching the juice dribble down hands, the peel land on the pillows and the pits spit out on the floor.
Romance remembers cooking eggs two ways.
It remembers getting in a car in the middle of the night one winter and driving out to the farthest point it could go without a passport. It remembers parking the car. Someone ran out of the car, down the hill, kicking up sand, and stood at the edge of the ocean, sprayed with the Atlantic must. Romance remembers the waves slamming against the shore and screaming, and the blue-gold sunrise that coated the horizon like Easter egg dye.
Romance remembers watching the Empire State Building turn off its lights at 12:03, but saw the top of it beat on for planes and helicopter and other emotional projectiles. It remembers New York flooded with the dark of the night, and that is when Romance tucked its head back and pressed its palms into someone else’s palms, hands resting on the small of its back, fingertips touching hair and the hospital corners of the bed. Romance remembers that the Empire State Building is most impressive that second when the light go out, when the night is split into cold darkness and the warmth of anticipation.
It remembers being called out for all sorts of bullshit, like trying to make a building into a poem. It remembers delighting in the intellectual argument until it eventually, inevitably lost. It remembers trashing the rest of its poetry one night, drunk on scotch in the empty room.
Romance remembers slamming the door.
Romance remembers the cell phone it got, the messages it received, the blur and the noise and the paychecks. Romance made sandwiches all alone, first cutting them on the diagonal, then cutting its sandwiches perpendicular, then giving up cutting the sandwiches altogether.
It remembers the ammonia smell of cleaning detergent in the bottom of the sink. It remembers sleeping on opposite sides of the bed. It remembers the bank account, the underwear and the sweaty backseat of a cab and the boring, gentle way it crashed.
Romance remembers the dread.
But Romance isn’t dead. It knows its not dead—it can still hear the little machine beeping. It tries to sit up, but it can’t. The voices have faded back out. The tube scrapes its throat.
Romance is alone. It counts the beeps, one after another, as they unroll into the silence.
Romance lies and waits for someone to sit next to it. Eventually, someone does.
[this post was written by Brandy Alexander of thegloss.com - link to article is in the first line]
