The Rains

Well, the rains came and broke the drought and I thought that magically, mysteriously, in a moment of particular grace given to the gardener, my mother would get better. She hasn't. She stays the same, the hospital room stays the same (although the flowers look better, since yesterday I brought over a fishbowl & some marbles from Michaels Crafts and my brother commandeered some of those weirdly shaped hospital scissors and my mother deftly recut all the flowers and arranged them in the fishbowl until they looked like actual, you know, flowers as opposed to a random bouquet of roadside weeds shoved into a coke bottle by a six year old. Which goes to show that if you own the florist shop across from the hospital your living is assured regardless of your skill set or lack thereof.)

I'm the same too. It's kind of like a week long hangover: I'm spaced out, out of it - I'm all metaphors relating to the word out, except for the good ones like out and about or out of the closet. Of course this may have something to do with the fact that I'm spicing up my lengthy metaphorical hangover with doses of actual hangover just to break the monotony. It's getting harder and harder to drag myself to the hospital. I want to see Mom, and I think she wants to see me, but it feels so weird, and there she is all hooked up to tubes, with nurses bustling in and out, and no good news and if I'm out of it, well, hell, she's so out there she's approaching the second planet of Alpha Centauri. It's not a fun planet, that one, not a party place. It's dark and gray and drab and there are no bright colors: everything is muted and occasionally a machine or three will beep.