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READMITTED
MY MOM HAS transformed my bedroom into a hospital ward. I’m propped up by pillows
in my bed and attached to an IV. I’m surrounded by monitoring equipment. I eat nothing
but Jell-O.
Each time I awake, she’s by my side. She touches my forehead and speaks to me.
Sometimes I try to focus, to understand what she’s saying, but the sound is just out of my
reach.
I wake again sometime (hours? days?) later to find her standing over me, frowning at
her clipboard. I close my eyes and take inventory of my body. Nothing hurts or, more
accurately, nothing hurts too badly. I check in on my head, my throat, my legs. They’re all
fine. I open my eyes again to find her about to put me back to sleep.
“No!” I sit up much too quickly. I’m dizzy and nauseous at once. I mean to say I’m OK,
but no sound comes out.
I clear my throat and try again. “Please don’t make me sleep anymore.” I at least need
to be awake if I’m going to be alive. “Am I OK?” I ask.
“You’re OK. You’re going to be OK,” she says. Her voice trembles until it breaks.
I pull myself to seated and look at her. Her skin is pale, almost translucent, and it’s
stretched too tight across her face. A painful-looking blue vein stretches down from her
hairline to her eyelid. I can see other blue veins just under the skin of her forearms and
wrists. She has the frightened, disbelieving eyes of someone who witnessed something
horrible and is waiting for more horrors to come.
“How could you do this to yourself? You could’ve died,” she whispers.
She steps closer, hugs a clipboard to her chest. “How could you do this to me? After
everything?”
I want to say something. I open my mouth to say it, but nothing comes out.
My guilt is an ocean for me to drown in.
I remain in bed after she leaves. I don’t get up to stretch my body. I turn my face away
from the window. What do I regret? That I went outside in the first place. That I saw and
fell in love with the world. That I fell in love with Olly. How can I live the rest of my life in
this bubble now that I know all that I’m missing?
I close my eyes and try to sleep. But the sight of my mom’s face earlier, all the
desperate love in her eyes, won’t leave me. I decide then that love is a terrible, terrible
thing. Loving someone as fiercely as my mom loves me must be like wearing your heart
outside of your body with no skin, no bones, no nothing to protect it.