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“He doesn’t love me.” I sob violently. “He didn’t want me.”
“It’s not true. I held him while he cried for you. It happened many times.”
The apartment I’m renting is on the twenty-first floor of a new high-rise overlooking Central Park.
It’s strangely designed, with just three rooms, all made of mostly glass. The bed is just your basic full, and pushed into the corner of two glass walls, at the corner of the twenty-first floor. I could tint the glass, hide myself from binoculars and birds, but I can’t bring myself to do that. Not sure why.
I sit on the bed and look out over the city. The park is a dark splotch, with gold freckles: twinkling lights. All around it, buildings glisten. Between sky-scrapers, the sun rises and falls, tossing streaks of color at my windows.
Tonight I watched the sunset sitting cross-legged on the bed, and since then, haven’t really gotten up. I watch the world move out my window and am glad I’m so high above the city, so no one can see me.
I found a shirt of Cleo’s in my bags—a t-shirt that says GREEK SING—and I’m wearing it, even though it’s a small and I’ve already gained enough weight back to need a medium.
The t-shirt pushes my central line against my chest, and that’s uncomfortable. But I don’t care. If I had her pants, I’d wear them too. As it is, I wear the pants she bought me. Longue pants in green and black and blue. I never noticed what she did until I got packed up to leave the unit. How there are three pairs of each pant. I thought about why, and the only thing I could come up with was that she wanted it to be easy on me, wasting away. When I started dropping weight, she would just rotate the pants out.
I drop my chin down to my chest and inhale. Do I smell her? She never wore her Green Tea perfume in the hospital, but she still had a distinct scent. I tell myself I’m inhaling it right now. I rub my thumb and forefinger over the seam of my left sleeve and picture her arm in the shirt.
When I had Cleo removed from my visit list, I sent her stuffed sloth and most of the pink fleece blankets with her. I kept one, and Cleo’s pillow. Selfish. No surprise there.
I sleep on the pillow every night, and wrap myself in pink blankets. The apartment has a living/area kitchen, too, as well as a large bathroom, but I mostly spend my time in bed. Maybe it’s a side-effect of spending so much time in one room for so many weeks.
I sigh. I stretch my sore legs beneath the covers, and in the process, I knock over a bowl half-filled with rice, ground beef, and gravy—all of which I made myself.
“Well, fuck.”
I scoop the food into the bowl and set it on the night-stand. Then I hang my legs off the bed’s side and take my breathing mask from atop another pillow. Twice a day I have to do this. Attach a cylinder of chemicals onto the bottom of the mask, strap the thing around my head, and breathe as deeply and as slowly as I can.
My lungs are still healing. Willard thinks they’ll recover over time, but no one knows for sure.
I was intubated, on a ventilator, for six days, with only moderate sedation, meaning I remember every bit of how it felt to have the tube down in my throat. Sometimes at night, I wake up clutching my mouth, trying to pull it out. Funny, because my nightmares from the first transplant weren’t very different really—focused on the mouth sores that, at that time, were the worst thing I’d endured. Before my relapse, I would often wake up with a phantom aching throat.
I chose the moderate sedation as opposed to deeper sleep because I could still move my arms and legs a little. Several times a day, a PT came and made me exercise, which cut down on the muscle loss. I dropped twenty-seven pounds my twelve days in the ICU, and since then, have tried hard to gain them back.
I do what I’m supposed to do, since I got discharged last week. Eat, sleep, lift weights, run on the treadmill in the living room. I have doctor’s appointments constantly. I have a personal shopper, because I can’t really leave this space without risking an illness. Sometime in the next six months, that should get better.
After my breathing treatment, I lay down on my back and read a few unfolded sparrows. Even though they’re worn and ragged now, I still think of the sheets of paper as sparrows.
I read through them all two times before I curl on my side and lift out the one I’m reading most often right now. It’s a poem called “Longing” by Matthew Arnold. The words make tears fall from my eyes. It’s nothing new. I cry a fucking lot since I moved out of the unit.
My “outpatient life” counselor keeps pushing me to do a screening for depression, but I know I don’t need that shit. I don’t need a pill, or some kind of therapy where I talk about my shit with someone who doesn’t know shit about me or my life. It’s fucking simple really. I like crying over Cleo.
No, it’s not my thyroid. My testosterone is fine as well. They test all that shit, all the time. I’m healthy, in those ways at least. I’m A-okay. So what if I never use my dick? I still wake up with wood. My balls ache, telling me to let them blow sometimes, but I don’t care. One time I ignored them for six days and woke up in a pool of my own cum.
Pathetic.
Just like last time after discharge, I avoid the mirror, though this time, the reasoning is different. My hair’s growing back in—thick, soft gold—and I’m filling out from all the lifting, but I just... don’t want to see my face. I think it will make me think of her face. Of her hands in my hair.
I scoot to the bed’s edge and press my hand against the glass wall. The cool is soothing. I scoot closer and let my forehead touch as well. It almost feels like a cool hand. Her hand.
I look at the clock: 1:46 AM. I have a blood draw at 8 AM tomorrow morning. I need to go the fuck to bed. I tug the blankets up to my neck and curl onto my side. Then I push a pillow behind me.
“Goodnight, Cleo. I love you.”
Tonight, the darkness seems to leak into my heart. I ache terribly for her. I hold her pillow to my chest and start to cry, so hard and
fast it’s sobbing.
She’s not coming back.
