A Sunflower with Her Face in the Middle

Sometimes your world shrinks wildly: to the precise diameter of your mom’s aortic valve, for example, or the too-minute value that shows up on the pulse monitor. Your world is the width of a hospital gurney. Your world is the size of a hand on a hospital sheet that suddenly seems too small.

I’ve been catching the news in nightmare flashes—marines in L.A., raids planned for cities including my own, brave protesters, the lines of riot shields and tear gas that are the all too omnipresent symbols of the US police state. But my world is smaller than usual right now, and I don’t have much to say about any of it.

One of the oddities of navigating the hospital system (besides getting used to an endless array of overstimulating lights and beeps and blinks and the arrhythmia of good and bad news) is that you’re not allowed to bring flowers to an ICU. This is considered outmoded by some hospital systems, who point out that risk of bacterial infection from flower water or blooms is minimal. Others hew to a rule that’s been around since, more or less, the ‘90s, in wards where the risk of infection is high. At any rate, I’ve been thwarted in my overwhelming and even irrational desire to give my mom flowers.

So, finally, I painted some. Not well! I’m not good at acrylics and it was a rush job I dried under a fan and then had to bring over in the rain. But it’s hanging in her room now, stuck up with medical tape. You can paint colors of roses that never existed. You can hope as hard as you can.

I love you all, and I’ll be back when I can be. But right now my world is the size of a non-metaphorical heart, a complicated electric muscle which, for me, right now, is a little larger than the entire universe. As Fernando Pessoa put it in 1930,

The whole of me is like a force that abandons me.

All of reality looks at me like a sunflower with her face in the middle.