The doctor and nurse discuss what they’re seeing on the screen, throwing out words that are completely foreign to me.
“We’ve got it,” the nurse says finally, pushing something into my arm. “Relax now, Kathleen. We’ll take it from here.”
Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think.
As the sedative starts to kick in, it becomes easier not to.
BEFORE
December
“You’re probably starting to feel quite foggy by now, a little sleepy, which is perfectly normal,” the doctor says. “Try to relax.”
“She’s so restless,” a woman says now, the nurse, I think. The fog makes it hard to tell.
“Here,” she says, and takes my hand, squeezes.
It helps. It stills the tremor coursing through me, vibrating like a plucked string.
I can still feel the warmth of her grip as I fall into a cloudy, quiet state. And as I feel things starting to disappear,seethings starting to dull in the window of my mind, I panic. The cars go first. Round-faced vehicles with headlights shaped like bulging eyes, on a street I recognize vaguely. The grass goes next. Tables, then people. Random strangers in different parts of different scenes.
It’s when the sound goes with them that I start to panic.
What am I doing?
I try to squeeze the woman’s hand, to tell her to stop it. I don’t want to forget.
I don’t want to forget.
Not even how it felt.
Not even how it hurt.
Not yet.
Because it mattered and it made me different and maybe I was wrong. Maybe I can handle it.
I can handle it.
But my hands don’t seem to move, don’t seem to convey any sort of message to the nurse, and the people and things and memories keep vanishing.
So I search for something I can hold on to. A sturdy, firmly planted pillar in the middle of a tornado.
A piece of music. Bach.
I’ve always hidden things in my music. I don’t know if it will be enough.
Still, I grab on to it. I don’t let go.
AFTER
January
As I’m falling under, I start to panic.
At that feeling of things disappearing, the edges growing dim, the spot left vacant by things I can’t hold on to.
“Just relax,” a murky voice says to me, and I tell myself to.
