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“I brought you maple creams,” I say, holding out a five-pound box of chocolate-covered candy for Lindsay to ignore. For the last three days, I’ve visited her every day.
And for the last three days, she’s refused to communicate. Eyes closed, breathing slow, body tense. She has no idea that I understand. I do. I get it more viscerally than she could possibly know.
And that’s why I’m not giving up.
She can ignore me.
But I’ll keep coming back until the day she doesn’t.
When I woke up in my own hospital bed four years ago, sore and bruised and in denial, I let that dark slimy part of my soul take over. It’s the insidious voice that tries to convince you that life is nothing but an endless, monotonous series of seconds you have to endure because you have no value. By letting yourself be victimized – yeah, I said it, victimized – you’re forever tainted. Weak. Stupid and foolish, easily suckered.
And that will never change.
Physical pain is bad enough. Time halts in place when you’re experiencing it, as if being graciously polite, giving pause to recognize the searing interruption. You can’t rush time. You can’t get through being at the receiving end of someone else’s intentional pain because you don’t count.
You’re not important.
You have no will.
It’s not even about losing control, because everyone loses control. All of us have moments where we are at someone else’s mercy. You have two choices:
Reduce the opportunity for that to happen or hope that when it does happen, they aren’t evil.
And if they are?
Well...I don’t know.
I still don’t know.
I wish I had the answers. I’m just a guy showing up day in and day out to pry his girlfriend out of the little fortress she’s hiding in, hoping a five-pound box of sugar might help.
You think I have the answer?
I’m as clueless as anyone else.
And that pisses me off.
I set the open box next to her, down by her thighs. Her gunshot wound is healing enough that the dressing is smaller, less bulky, and it looks like she has more mobility. There’s a deck of cards sitting in front of her on the bed tray, a rubber band around them. A cup of red juice and some of her favorite potato chips sit there, tauntingly normal.
“If you don’t eat one of those, I’ll have to give them to the nurses, and they’ll flirt with me. Please don’t make the nurses flirt with me, Lindsay. One of them looks like she’s a box of chocolates away from pinching my butt.”
Nothing. No response.
I know from the doctors that she communicates with nods. Makes noise when she’s in pain. Harry and Monica talk about her “choice” not to talk, but I know better.
There is no choice here.
She can’t.
If I’m right, Lindsay is on her own, an astronaut adrift in space, enough oxygen to make it through each day but with the lonely terror of the unknown gaping before her, so silent it’s piercing, so darkly beautiful it hypnotizes you at the same time it paralyzes.
You just float.
But you float in a bleak abyss. It’s a painful infinity, numb and cold, blinding and agonal.
And I have to break her out of that internal jail.
She’s a prisoner of circumstance, locked away in her own mind. No one can pull you out of it. You have to decide for yourself.
