A Fragment of Memory

And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah -- Hallelujah, Orig. Leonard Cohen

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Some things take a lot longer to work its way out of your system. Alcohol takes a couple hours. Food poisoning takes about a day. Inhaled toxins can take several days. Love can take a lifetime. One of those powerful life lessons I've never managed to get the hang of, living with lost love is more painful than laying on your back in ICU with countless tubes and needles maintaining your every bodily function.

You need to get your priorities straight.

A line I've heard from my father on more than one occasion.

You care too much for others.

If I spin through the old reels of memories I've kept in the back of mind mind, I can still come across one spool of film I'd given quite a bit more attention to when I stored it than the rest, which tend to be scattered here and there across a dusty cabinet and onto the floor. This one I'd run my fingers over pensively for a few brief moments before slipping the clean metal casing open and breathing in the fumes of another time. These days I stop and think to myself how often I'd done this. It strikes me as odd in the way that I thought myself over the events it contains. I thought I could finally move on and not wonder about the "what ifs" and the "then whats".

The man in those pictures; the people that were around us, and the things that happened to us have affected me in more than one way. In fact, I am a completely different person from who I surely would have become had it not been for his presence in my life. Surely, anyone could say that for anyone at all. But it's what happened in the end of the time we had together that changed me the most...

The hallways twisted in ways I couldn't follow, and after several complicated turns we found ourselves in a darkened passage. The first opening on the left was without any door save the typical thick curtain common in hospitals; beneath it a thick line of austere light reflected off the patterned tiled floors. I hesitated before I followed the other two beyond its wavering boundaries. I closed my eyes and took a breath to calm the already rapid beat of my heart, and couldn't help but wish it were more like the resounding beeps in the distance, too slow to be life-giving. I allowed the pressure of the now-empty hall give me the strength to follow the others into the room.

On a bed in the corner, amidst a web of wires and tubes anchored here and there by machines and monitors of varying sizes and displays, lay a man I had come to love. His face pale, my eyes slipped down to where several of those same tubes and wires ended unseen behind a thin hospital gown draped somewhat carelessly across his torso. The younger woman reached up and adjusted it for him and smiled lightly as a bit of ragged breath escaped from her chest...

These are things that I have seen in my head too often lately. Things I wish never were... Things I thought I was over, but for some reason keep cropping up. What is it, if anything, that I need to see in them? I feel that because of all this, I do the things I do; I feel the way I feel...