It's late summer. The low hum of a hedge trimmer three streets over mingles with my mother's polka music. Beside me, a tall glass of herbal iced tea slowly sweats beads of moisture onto the deck boards. I am surrounded by light, a warm and gentle light. I seek its cleansing purity to forget, but the words float back to my mind like driftwood on the tide: "We'll take care of it . . . she'll be okay."
Rolling down the harshly-lit corridor to the psychiatric ward-- a pair of brown terry cloth slippers and a yellow robe on my lap, both hospital issue-- I sign myself in. It's stifling hot in the consultation room. The artificial light burns my eyes. They send me off with cotton in my mouth to socialize and feel better about living. That's when I see you across the day room-- you seem too young to be here. So anxious, frightened. I try to say something comforting, but my tongue swells over my teeth. You make a familiar gesture, point to your right ear and shrug. Deaf. My God, I wonder, how will you make it in here?
My hands have forgotten most of your language. I use what I remember to make an awkward attempt at easing your fear. You tell me I'm the only person here who knows even a little. "Not even the nurses?" I ask. You burst into tears. While the others watch, I hold you in a fragile embrace, trying to contain the despair welling up inside you, inside me. My own insignificance takes my words away. My hands grow numb. Raindrops skid down the greasy window panes and bleed onto the ancient brownstone sills. The light from the window is gray. A nurse takes you from me. With a conciliatory smile, she intones, "We'll take care of it . . . she'll be okay."
Such intensity dominates my mind: how much I envy and fear the depth of your feelings. I lie awake in the semi-darkness wondering if I can go that deep without destroying myself. Isn't that why I'm here? I want to die and be reborn. I want you as my midwife with a different voice: the one whose hands can bring forth life and praise it simultaneously-- who can dismember the air in anger then embrace it with joy. I fold these possibilities into my racing manic thoughts until the nurse comes to offer something to help me sleep.
Morning rounds. More medication. I pull my yellow robe tight about me. Yellow is the color of our visibility and invisibility. Conversation, like thought, becomes heavy and drawn. My signs, my words, begin to slur. I apologize for my linguistic incompetence. You shrug it off. You seem better, handling everyone gracefully, showing us how to communicate with you. Necessity has taught you well, my friend.
They didn't bother to put a blanket over you when you fell later that day. You and I were walking down the hall, talking, when your body stiffened. You landed hard on the floor, already unconscious, your yellow robe crumpled around you.
Stunned, I called for the nurse. She leaned over the desk: "Who fell?" (Does it matter?) "Oh, I see . . . we'll take care of it . . . she'll be okay."
I sat on the floor next to you for several minutes before anyone came.
Eventually, the doctor found the right people to help you, and in the moment it takes for light to cross a threshold, you were gone. But that's the way things are in that place. It's a holding pen for people in distress until they can figure out what to do for us, if anything. In the meantime, we conduct our rituals in the day room: priests and priestesses chanting in yellow robes, seeking salvation in pleated paper cups, p.r.n.
I am 'gone' from there, too, sitting here wishing I had one more chance to let my hands articulate all I could not say until now. Condensation from my glass slips between the deck boards and splatters on the ground like cold tears. Small droplets form on the blades of grass below me. The hedge trimmer stops and I beg my mother to find something else on the radio. There is silence from inside the house. I think about the sign for emotion/feeling. I extend my right hand, and with the tip of my middle finger, lightly brush the center of my chest upward: the idea being to touch the heart. The sun feels warm and yellow. Yellow is the color of the sun, of hope. Ambivalence and despair vanish under its light.
Copyright 1999 by Joan Rizzo