There’s something comforting about being taken care of. Detained. Stripped down like the day we were born. Torn from the womb of addiction; hollow, helpless and incomplete. Assigned a number, a wrist tag, a boxed-in bed, and monitored for vitals every four hours.
There’s something comforting about being served 3 meals a day without choice. Suddenly the worst food imaginable becomes a highly anticipated delicacy, and that’s all we get. Single-serving milk cartons, tiny salt and pepper packets, baby carrots in plastic bags.
There’s something comforting about wearing scrubs; all of us alone together fighting to save our own lives. The people I meet each time become temporary friends. We share our time together over instant coffee and creamers that never spoil held by birthday-banded wrists, and that’s all we get.
And so we wait.
We wait as the clock crawls carelessly across our impatient and unsettled minds until an angel appears to watch us choke down the next pill.
And we wait.
We wait for Mephistopheles to descend again. His presence drains like an old friend cascading through once-hopeful ventricles, leaving a calcified distortion of what it was to feel loved.
And we wait.
This bed, this voluntary prison where earplugs and eye masks, plastic shower shoe soles and tiny cups of pills find more value than any smart phone or Coach bag ever could. Bed sheets like soft sandpaper, walls of tempered glass with dangling shades that taunt, offering a passage of days through muffled-screams of sunlight. All the while sounds of garbage trucks or taxi cabs float on in a perfect ignorance below.
We wait.
This womb of safety, this holy little sweat-drenched sanctuary of strangers’ trust where loneliness can’t exist anymore, if only for a short while.
There’s a culpable gratitude on the day you leave your chosen captivity, like that decedent bite of foie gras, or the first summer’s sun on your face that you know slowly gives you cancer.
There’s a grace in the little freedoms, like the choice to make your own locally-roasted single-origin fair-trade organic coffee just the way you like it, or doing laundry with biodegradable non-toxic detergent made in little sheets instead of plastic gallons heading swiftly to an ocean’s fate.
Theres an honor in waking up in the witches hour to the full moon’s lonely owl, instead of shift changes, janitors, and snoring.
There’s an emotional affinage that begins.
A slow, invariable refinement contingent on a developed evolution, the way a photograph offers a latent rising, as if to beg for your attention to be so brave to see its beauty.
And then your hands smell like fixer for days.
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