Alive

“The scalpel will cut you my friend.”
“I know, I can see it,” but it slipped, across the mylar, over the metal straight edge, down and into the fleshy tip of my left pointer finger. I looked calmly at it until the blood beaded up and then poured through the surface. By the time it was dripping I had moved it over the plexiglass to catch the spill. When it had leaked enough I wrapped it in tissue and moved on. Moving on.
When I got home, I called my baby. My baby had been suffering.
“How do you feel?”
“Not good.”
“Not good, how?”
“I can’t seem to shake these headaches.”
Sigh. “Yea.” I couldn’t say much else. Spirituality, wisdom, faith, healing, is all a matter of action and mostly a private affair. She didn’t want to engage in dialogue about the ethos of election politics or the Giants or anything else. I didn’t either. So I listened to her talk about the day, my face hidden from her on the other end of the internet call.
“I planned my funeral today. With my mother.”
“Yes babe. That’s good. Did it help?”
“I don’t know. It was all so distant, the opportunity. Like the whole idea of it wasn’t real.”
“It’s not real in some ways. If you die in there you won’t know it, but we will. So it’s good but they are not doing this operation to kill you, they’re doing it to save you.”
Later I told this to Z who laughed, “I don’t plan anything. I am nothing if not faithful.”
“I know it. That is why I get you so well. You live.” Then I laughed thinking of our month to month. “We live with never a dull moment; we can say that, we are not boring.” Then we talked about love, romantic love, the kind that waits but can’t wait, the kind that woos. And that’s when we’re at our best, in the denizen sea, in the great open space, in the best of friendship.
But he saw the darkness in the sunken form of my eyes. He saw the rich material wearing on my skin which I wish was plated with silver and platinum in torrents. “You love your pain,” he said, “you love your suffering.”
“Yes but I don’t know why I choose it or attract it. Maybe it’s because I stand with what essentially was the others.” I wanted to be the other because what I had was too much, middle class even though we were lower middle class and at times poor. Getting a leg up, keeping it up, not ending up like them. Us and them. So now I suffer in hopes of something better or in hopes of a better expression. It’s coming I know, I have the feeling… Stay alive baby, get healthy.