Terms like unremitting horror, chaos, and the lyrical mantra of Roll the Bones strobe through my skull like summer heat lightning. Equations within the mathematics of my thoughts as a mourning infusion of jasmine tea steeps. Once, it was said hot jasmine tea fixes everything, even that, which is not broken. In context, the metaphor seems like bubblegum and bailing wire over an impact crater from an asteroid the size of Pavarotti's ass.
A very dear friend of mine, family by neither blood nor marriage, lies in a sickhouse bed. Crushed and broken. Matted with the stink of blood. The details of how she arrived there are shrouded in a certain kind of mystery, although a tree and the rolling of a vehicle were involved.
I worry for her. For the life she carries in her body. The one she would jokingly call an alien bean and I called a parasite. If it survives, it will be named after a beautiful friend of ours who has since walked on. If she survives, I wonder if she'll want me to get her meat-drunk on porterhouse, like I did the last time she was in the very same sickhouse, although that was for very different reasons, so long ago.
In being encouraging, I want to refer to her with nicknames of champ, tiger, sport, and trooper. I used such monikers with my mother when she was so sick. Given the state of things in context of my mother, I dismiss inflicting those titles upon my friend.
Tired. Sore. Anxious. We sat in the waiting room into the small hours. The biology of habit and obligations to three of the quadrupeds in my household did not allow for many hours of slumber. Concern did not allow for it to be restful. I do not seek martyrdom in these facts, that would be petty, and I know there are those, related by blood and marriage, who have slept far less than me, if at all.
This is the crunch time. The most important of moments. Here and now could show the way to life or death. How scarring the damage inflicted could be.
I am hiding and waiting. I make breakfast more out of habit and the zen calm of cooking than hunger. Perhaps, through the prism of memory, I'll be able to chuckle about parking a space numbered 187, and law enforcement order's code for homicide. I have never been the type to prey, unless in context of the food chain. Here and now, the thought of any anthropomorphic deity of any mythology, invites thoughts of caustic anonymous graffiti scrawled across a bunkhouse wall in Mauthausen concentration camp;
"If there is a god, he will have to beg for my forgiveness..."
Yeh, it's like that...
So, I wait. Wait for news. Good or bad is a roll of the bones, and, rationally, I realize that. As a friend, who is family by neither blood or marriage, I wonder and worry. Part of me prepares for the worst I hope does not happen. Another bit wonders if I'll be committing to taking her out for steak at that one dive I took her years ago after another sickhouse stay to get intoxicated upon the cooked flesh of another species. I might not be the preying type, unless in context of the food chain, but a set of words resounds over and over again within the walls of my skull like a mantra;
Hang in there, mon ami, don't you dare fucking quit...
