Notes from the surge: Love in the time of covid

2 months in. 

My buddy Matt texted our group when his team was still doing contact tracings at LAX as the first covid cases landed in US airports. I don't even remember when it was, and can't find the texts anymore because they're now buried in a million exchanges since then. I wanna say January. Matt's CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service. If there were such a thing as CDC black ops, he would be it. And he told us about this thing called "flattening the curve" months before it became the trendy internet meme it is today. 

It feels like so long ago. Kealia was still in school, stores were still open, and I wasn't living in my parents' basement. A few weeks later they shut down flights and travel. My friend Carlos, who is an NCSP fellow at UCLA, couldn't fly to Rochester to see his wife Katrina, an ob/gyn chief resident at my former hospital, for their anniversary. "Love in the time of covid," he would say. It became kind of a catchphrase for my residency friends. 

Then all the work emails started coming. Surge preparation. Re-deploying hospital staff, restructuring workflow, new trainee and student roles, new unit structures. Supplies, and rationing PPE. The call for extra help, extra shifts. People immediately began losing their minds, questions and theories about covid19 pathophysiology began pouring out, and the system was flooded with so many emails that they had to ask us to dial it down. We still only had a few cases back then. 

I remember the night the NBA shut down. Rudy Gobert had just contracted covid19 and also made an ass of himself on national television when he touched all of the locker room reporters' mics as a joke just before being diagnosed. It was mid-March. Kobe had just died less than 2 months prior. I had a fight with my wife the next day about my wearing scrubs home from work. I signed up for extra shifts, and then we fought about that too. We canceled our trip to Disney World as the shutdowns engulfed the country. Her aunt, who was staying with us to help with the baby, had her flight home canceled as well. A week later I was re-deployed to the covid unit. And that was pretty much the start of this whole thing for me. 

A former mentor in residency once had a couch talk with me about career advice. It was when I was figuring out whether to apply for pulmonary/critical care fellowship. I'll never forget one of the questions he asked--"So there's a house on fire. Do you run into it, or run to get help?" 

"I'd run in," I said quickly, immediately feeling like an ass-hat after. Like one of those douchey doctor types that goes around wearing their white coat or ID badge in public. "I mean, I'm not trying to be a hero or show off or anything." He nodded in understanding. It was just my psychological illness, he said. Something along those lines. 

It was hard convincing Angie though. 

- They have plenty of other people. Just work the shifts you already have. Who cares about the extra pay. Your family needs you too. Stop telling me it's safe, you literally just said they have a PPE shortage. Why you. You're only a first-year hospitalist, they can just find someone else. What are you trying to prove. 

- I'm not trying to prove anything. Why're you being so difficult about this. I don't care what other people think, but it'd be nice if YOU were a little proud of me. 

- I AM proud of you, you idiot. I can't believe you would say that. And now you're making me the bad guy. You are such an idiot. 

So, no surprise to anyone, I'm sure, but yes, I am an idiot--as it turns out, no one supports me more than my wife. I am an idiot that is still married though. 

But I'm 2 months in now. I've been living in my parents' basement ever since. Not that we think it's completely necessary or anything, because not every doctor or nurse is doing this. But our apartment is too small to avoid a ton of contact with everything as I walk in the door. Her aunt is also from China, and doesn't have health insurance. So while she's stranded here, we can't risk getting her sick. It's also not just a few cases anymore. It's an almost-constant overwhelming surge that feels like it has no end in sight. They tell us the numbers are getting better. It sure as hell doesn't feel better. 

We wheeled a guy in his 40s with covid19 to the ICU the other day when there was no space. They had to wheel a guy out who had just been extubated to make room, so our guy came in red hot with just barely enough time to be intubated. The floor unit has also been tight on staffing lately, so there was only one nurse available to transport him--I gowned up and went with her, one hand pulling the bed while the sterile hand held a clean ambu bag in case he went down in the hallways. All I could hear was my pulse bounding in my ears, and Jess behind me calling "Left! Right! Hit the button!" as she steered. 

Earlier in the course, covid patients on hospice or other end-of-life care (meaning they were dying and nothing could be done, so we would only give meds to keep them comfortable, letting them pass away peacefully and naturally) would sometimes pass away without staff knowing right away. They'd be found after the fact, on the next routine nursing check. In normal circumstances, end-of-life patients can be checked in on frequently by nursing because you can simply walk into their room and assess them in less than a minute. Families could also sit with them until the end. In the era of covid, it's not that simple. Donning PPE properly takes time. Once you go in, you can't just walk back out then go back in, because you have to waste a set of PPE each trip in and out. You also can't go in every couple hours. You can't leave the door open to watch them from the hallway. And you can't have families come in and sit with them for hours. If they're not trained to use PPE properly, they touch their faces and their masks, rip their gowns accidentally, mess up their gloving and de-gloving technique. 

So yes, some end up dying alone, but not of anyone's choosing. Quite simply, we don't have the means or the manpower to constantly look in on them. We've worked on solutions. Accommodations for last visitations by families, setting up video chats and phone calls in the rooms. Video monitors. Using rooms with windows. Last month we moved a couple patients to window rooms where family could see them while standing outside the hospital. There's always unforeseen problems though. I sent up the chain an idea to use cardiac monitoring on end-of-life patients. We normally don't do that, because we can just watch them physically instead of wasting a cardiac monitor on someone who doesn't need it. But in this case it helps alert us to when their heart rate slows, so we can gown up to sit with them in their final moments. 

It's worked relatively well so far, but on one case, we failed to get into the room on time. We saw her heart rate drop from 90 to 30s, and knew it was coming. I went upstairs to grab my PPE and print a handoff while her nurse went to grab a few other supplies, and by the time I was down, she was already in flatline. Her hand was still warm when we got into the room. We literally missed her by seconds. Fucking seconds. 

Her granddaughter later asked me over the phone if anyone was with her when she died. I told her that we were. It's one lie even God would forgive, I think. 

But the house is still burning, and people are getting pretty exhausted from running in. Even when you're off duty, it's tough to let go. The first day off is always the worst. I spend mine chart checking, texting people in the hospital, emailing neurotically. I pace circles in the basement. I scan headlines and read updates on clinical trials. I ask friends at work if they need help and they say thanks, but never actually ask for anything. I suppose I wouldn't either. I sleep less on my first day off than when I'm actually on. 

Angie told me again last night how proud of me she was. My parents texted me the same from upstairs earlier in the week. I don't know what to say. Matt and his wife Brooke are having a baby girl later this month. We sent them an infant dress a couple months ago. River turned 4 months old, he's teething now. My mom cut my hair last week. Angie cut bangs for Kealia. A couple friends in Houston got married with a Zoom reception last month. 

Love in the time of covid. I don't know what to say. Life goes on. 

Strangers I've never met say thank you to me these days. Love in the time of covid. I don't know what to say. 

Maybe "Amen." 

 

On Piano Lessons and Cancer Patients

              When I was six, my mother and father saw me once playing with an electric keyboard at a friend’s house. While the adults ate a long dinner and chatted over countless pots of hot tea, I spent the entire night fascinated with its synth-like tones and all the instrument options available: harpsichord, flute, trumpet, even full orchestra. The family hosting dinner had a daughter about my age that was taking lessons, and so did a few others that were there that night. Sometime later that year, my parents bought a small upright piano for about $300 at a yard sale. It was janky and tarnished, but had 88 working keys and held tune reasonably well. Private lessons would’ve been a big deal for us back then, but since my father was still a PhD student, the university’s school of performing arts granted us a discount. Soon after, my Sunday mornings became occupied by Emma, a sweet but pushy Russian woman who was easily exasperated by lazy wrists and limp fingertips.

              The etudes, scales, sonatinas, tarantellas, preludes and Hungarian whatsits piled on, and I had no concept of how they were separated. They were all just songs, nevermind who wrote them or whether they were for practice or performance. Emma taught me for the next 4 years, holding my wrists up when they dangled and selecting pieces for me to showcase as seemingly endless recitals came and went. Before teaching each new piece, she played them for me almost effortlessly, hands sweeping and gliding over the keys in a way mine never did. She sat next to me and held me close before and after each recital, fervent and excited for each moment, and once, when I forgot the last stanza of a performance piece on stage and ran down, she wrapped her arms around my head with gentle shushes as I cried in embarrassment. Piano was both a daunting and safe space for me. It was hard, fierce, terrifying, but also lovely, warm, comforting.

              When we moved from Syracuse, we sold the tarnished mini-upright and the lessons were put on hold for a few years, until, living in Seattle, I reached middle school and we decided to buy another piano—an upgrade, which I could pick out myself from a real piano store this time. I tested them all by playing big, fat 8-note chords with the sustain pedal depressed all the way. I settled on a full upright burgundy Kawai, the one that had the deepest and most haunting reverb I could find in the store. Then we settled on another Russian teacher, Tonya. Also peeved by languid wrists. Also played effortlessly and beautifully. And I learned again, this time less with boyish wonder and more with teenage apathy, but with no less of that opposing tension as before.

              So the lessons and recitals continued, until we moved once again, and then they stopped once again, and beyond that, piano in my adult years became an infrequent indulgence for an audience of my mother and father, in the kitchen cooking on my arrivals back home for a visit. Then the audience expanded to include my girlfriend—now my wife—and now includes my daughter as well, who insists on running over to bang on the keys as I play, lest she be left out of any event not centered completely around her. 

              When I first moved to Rochester and started working at the hospital, among the first things I noticed was that there was a baby grand piano in the main lobby, sectioned off by queue dividers with thick blue felt ropes hanging between them. Another stood in the lobby of the cancer center. Both were electronically programmed to play mellow classics and were meant more for distraction than showcase. Both had signs positioned above them warning against playing or touching them.

              Both pianos are polished black and pearl, usually never a smudge on them. The one in the lobby of the cancer center tower sits below large floor-to-ceiling glass panes and reflects the light of the day. In the winters, after fresh snow has fallen and crystallized on the ground, sunlight both reflects off the ground and pours from above, and the lobby is lit strikingly against the lonely piano that no one ever plays. At night I sometimes walk through the tower lobby and think that if there were a janitor or after-hours secretary getting on with the final moments of their day, I would break all rules and play for them.

              More so than that, I think back to the patients and families I’ve met in the tower. As an intern, I would visit some of them after my shifts if I was worried they were scared. I sat with Lewis and his wife when I knew we were coming up on the end. Even when Lewis was walking the halls trying to get his second wind in the fight, working on getting strong enough for a round of palliative chemo, his eyes would still well up when I walked into his room at the end of the day. I smiled and made jokes, asked him to name his grandchildren for me so I’d know what to call them when they came. I visited Allison every day that she kept bleeding through the platelet transfusions. I held her hand when I told her we still didn’t have an answer for what she had, and sat down next to her mother to hear stories about Allison and her sister when they were growing up. They were spaces of both fear and warmth. I wished I could’ve played for them, just 6 floors below where we sat.

              The cancer tower was atypical in that sense. You’re not usually granted time like that—only in situations where you stay on a service for a month at a time, and patients also don’t leave the hospital for a month at a time. Otherwise not all patients love you. Many don’t like you, some don’t even respect you. One of the misfortunes about the small slices of time you’re normally given to form relationships is that it’s rarely enough to explain yourself to people. There’s not much time for them to explain themselves to you either. They don’t have time to hear your revised personal statement about why you wanted to be a doctor, and you don’t have time to hear why their lives collapsed and that’s why they don’t bother to take care of themselves anymore. Most of it has to be developed out of scraps, from which we make between-the-line assumptions about each other. Trust sometimes comes down to the tone of your voice and how you place your hands over their heart while probing for sounds with your stethoscope. Other times trust is a lost cause regardless what you do.

              I think we all carry around things we wish we had an audience for—things that could go lengths in explaining ourselves to others without us having to prove we are who we say we are. In college I spent weeks practicing and learning Clair de Lune after hearing a music student play it live in the courtyard. I learned a number of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words. I learned to play Before the Throne of God Above for a worship service at church once, and kept playing it long after. At this point, these are probably the only playable songs I have left in my memory (and shoddily at best), but I would’ve played them for Lewis and Allison regardless. Given adequate time, I wish I could play for all my patients. Patients want to be seen and understood, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, so do we. 

             My patients want me to know what their lives are like, what their suffering is like. When it’s clear I won’t continue to see them for long, they tell me up front all the frustrations they’ve been through, all the doctors that didn’t care in the past. They want me to know, because then, presumably, I’ll be on their side. I want time to read to them, sit with them, tell them stories, play music for them, because then, presumably, they’ll understand I was already on their side. But sometimes hostilities flare and neither party wants to do anything except move on. Chronic patients and chronic doctors become nihilistic—why seek to be understood if you only have a few minutes to explain yourself? If today you talk, but tomorrow someone new takes over? If today you have a treatment plan, but tomorrow the problem hasn’t changed? So me taking care of you is more of a business partnership now, and well, good, because we both like it better that way, right?

              It reminds me of the pianos we’re not allowed to touch—tidy, but not actualized. Pianos were meant to be played. People were meant to relate. Sometimes you get that, sometimes you don’t—it’s a truth that’s just part of the job. But this year, I’m making it a goal to learn a new piece, and hopefully play it for someone before the year’s out. Maybe I’ll have a chance to talk about Emma, and the burgundy Kawai at my parents’ house. And maybe I’ll hear some good stories in return.

What we talk about when we talk about love

Yesterday:

   I’ve wasted a Saturday afternoon, but it won’t be the last. But now that the days are longer, there are some salvageable daylight hours that weren’t there in the winter months, and I’ve dragged myself to a café in the Neighborhood of the Arts where people sit outside, lounging, smoking cigarettes and having aimless discussions in the sun. There’s an illusion I have about productivity and what it really is, because on days I set out to read a chapter about heart failure or kidney disease, my ratio of time spent reading to time spent on social media is maybe something like 1 minute of studying for every 10 on Facebook/Youtube. Yet now, sitting here reading Jack Gilbert and having no intention of studying whatsoever, I can’t help but feel like I’m doing something good with my time. I consider all the things I’m behind on, all the paperwork and emails I could be catching up on, but do none of it. Instead, I’m content to sit, go through old books and old lines already familiar to me, and let my mind wander. 

   It occurs to me that if my family were home today, I would’ve taken them to the park, and maybe we would have ended the day out here at the coffee shop regardless. I imagine Kealia scampering in and out underneath the tables and between chairs, picking up leaves and dropping them in flower pots while Angie claps and cheers. It’s an amazing thing, I think, witnessing a toddler learn in real-time about the world around her, and while thinking this, I’m hit with a sudden pang of regret as I realize I’ve missed almost two months of this already. 

   Do I even know what I’m doing anymore? In just a few short weeks, I become an upper level resident. A while ago, I was finishing a rotation in the MICU, and spent my final afternoon there doing three family meetings in a row—all of them delivering bad news. I capped it off by telling a man and his mother that their estranged brother/son would probably never recover from the brain injury he sustained due to his heart stopping multiple times in the emergency room. And although I had only met them one day prior, I sat alone with them in a small room and talked about their rocky family relationship with my patient over the years, how they eventually stopped reaching out but never actually gave up on him, then how he proceeded to use the last months of his life drinking himself to death, unbeknownst to anyone until he showed up at our doorstep in cardiac arrest. 

   Then came the moment when I couldn’t delay the bad news any longer, and had to tell them that we weren’t expecting him to ever recover from this, that all of our tests were showing poor brain activity, and that he would likely die if we took him off the breathing machine. I watched the mother turn to her other, still-breathing son with a look of terror, and utter a few breathless, fragmented sentences—

“But, he—well, what kind of tests did they—I mean, what does he mean by—oh my God—”

—before breaking down in her son’s arms, filling our small room with her desperate sobs. I remember watching them across the table, and for the first time this year, I felt myself begin to unravel inside—this was the 3rd family I had destroyed that day. I took a breath, wiped a hand across my face, blinked several times to clear up my completely blurred vision, and held the mother’s hand for the next several minutes while we slowly talked about what we could do next. Then I led them out of the cramped conference room back to the dying son’s bedside, and quickly signed out, thinking I would not do another goddamned family meeting for the rest of the year. 

   In retrospect, I should’ve let someone else do at least one meeting. Other people did in fact offer to help, but I declined, partly out of a feeling of responsibility to my patients, and partly out of not realizing that I had reached my limit. I suppose it’s easy to think that a strong sense of obligation makes you a better doctor, but the problem is the toll that obligation can take on you. At the beginning of the road to becoming a doctor, I think we’re all driven to some extent by a feeling of wonder about what the job entails, hoping and believing that the job is more privilege than it is burden. After certain struggles, we ask how we win back that sense of wonder and privilege about what we do. 

I don’t know. 

   But about a week ago, Alice and Hai-Long sent pictures from Hawaii, standing on Kealia beach and pointing to the lifeguard tower about half a mile up from where we were almost pulled away to our deaths four years ago. I think back to that terrifying Christmas morning, then to the day almost exactly two years later when Kealia was born, and can’t help thinking that there’s a certain element of destiny in our lives. Not destiny in a sense where we’re saying we have some ultimate fate that we can’t escape, but in a sense that there’s a real purpose in how life unfolds. Not that God (if you believe in a God) is the seer and decider of your future, but that God helps you find the possibility in your future. That seeing the death of a tragic alcoholic, and the devastating love of a mother for her estranged son, perhaps heightens the possibility for us who witnessed it to be better to each other in the future. 

   My mother used to tell me that love carries an element of destiny too. “If it’s meant to be, then it’s meant to be forever,” she would say. I thought it was just her corny way of consoling me through bad break-ups, but now I wonder if this kind of belief is something I’ll be teaching my daughter one day. Faith being not just how we endure the world, but how we continue to find wonder in it. Maybe when she’s older and we take her back to the beach of her namesake, and tell her again how we were meant to live, how I was meant to be her father, how Angie was meant to be her mother, and how one way or another, whether a doctor in the MICU someday or just a young girl looking off into the sea, she was meant to love, and be loved. 

16 days and counting. Come home soon, loves. 

Today

How I love you in this house today

In this world there are many ways
in which I could say this. One might be the way
I adjust the blinds of the kitchen window, below which
sits the supple veins of aloe we potted yesterday.
Or, it’s the way the lithe pothos vines might cascade
along the white trellis we’ve talked about
building for weeks now. It might be the red cactus
flower, blooming like a finned, downy mouth
on the cocked rail of the balcony. This life is all
I can think about these days. This soil and water.
Every slight wing of rain. It’s true, we have no money.
But look—watch the tillandsia today, the flickering
breeze through their tender stalks, peering over
the mouths of mason jars in blue daylight. Imagine
a world in which this could go on forever. Sowing and
reaping in green and blue infinity, letting the earth seep
into the golden oil of your palm. Imagine a world
in which I love you like this multitude of water
flowing over the dappled pebbles that cull it,
which is happening, here, in this house today, and
in this house, today which is happening, which is love.

So I'm falling back into old habits, like waking up at 4 in the morning and thinking, "Now would be a good time to write," instead of turning over and going back to sleep. It's been a struggle to keep writing this year, but in comparison, I've actually done far more this year than I have in all my years of med school combined.

But it nags at me. Makes me use up my precious sleep time on the first morning I go back to the hospital for clinical anything since last summer.

Angie stirs and I almost talk myself out of getting up. There's a fold in her waist, where her hip tilts up and angles into her side and back--I place my hand in it and count the lines of orange light cast down from the blinds. I remember in high school, I thought romance was things like film noir, smoke, mystery, black-and-white stills of Rita Hayworth or Ingrid Bergman under venetian blinds. Now I'm thinking this scene in my own bedroom could be that if the colors were just grayed out. But that's all less about substance and more about flare. There's much more to know in these silhouettes and the fold of my wife's waist than I would've imagined as a teenager.

A friend of mine once wrote, "All I want to do is love and write, in that exact order." He joined the coast guard about a decade ago to pay for college, and now they've also more or less paid for law school and two kids. As a recruit, he was once made to stand at attention and recite poetry for his ranking officers--

"What did you do before you came here, you useless turd?!"

"Sir! I was a poet, sir!"

"You were a what???"

He ultimately hung his hat up on writing for a while though. He gave some reasons, but I think it was just life catching up. You know how life tends to do that. On a recent phone call, we talked about Christmas cards, his son's diet ("What's that he's eating? No, I definitely see him chewing something."), and the Lego movie.

Sometimes, I also think what he used to. Love and write, in that order. Other times, I think maybe it's just enough to love. Just love, I think. But then I think, just write, too. Maybe they're the same for some people.

Anyway, good morning. It's a miraculous world that's happening today. HIV Team 6 starts in one hour.

Que lastima, pero adios!

So I've been going to this writer's workshop downtown at Gemini Ink. Every Wednesday morning, I pick up my friend Susan, who is probably a good 40-50 years older than I am, and we make the drive down I-10 to 513 S Presa. We're a motley crew, the 6-7 of us that come every week. Loren's a graphic designer from Seattle. Wilburn is a whimsical old crackpot with rampant ADHD. Terry's a local haunt of the San Antonio poetry workshops, crossed the border with her family as a little girl and made a life here. Casey is tall, always in sandals, seems to have aversion to wearing bras, and likes political topics. And Susan, the sweet elderly lady with bad arthritis, is a retired lawyer, lives alone, her late husband a pathologist and missionary in China in a former life. Finally there's me, the med student who spends his Wednesday mornings writing fiction and poetry.

Terry shared some of her inspiration last week, a poem called "Adios, Fresno" by Tim Hernandez, a writer and performance artist of the west coast and southwest. She explained the idea of using it as a prompt--writing about a city she'd left and the reasons she did so. Then I got to thinking about doing the same.

(Hear "Adios, Fresno" here: Tim Hernandez Poems)

So I wrote about Seattle--40 lines about what I hated, what I loved, and why I needed to leave. I guess I didn't write about why I went back after. But suffice to say, it's always been love/hate with me and Seattle. The city, the rain, the floating bridges, the trees, the mountains over the Pacific, then the black hole of loneliness, the depression, the things I never talked about growing up. I read it in the workshop today thinking it was overly affective and splashy, and was relieved to hear that nobody thought that was the case.

Then tonight I went to TA my med lit class, the topic of which was soldiers and war, and the comparison to doctors and medicine. One thing that got me a bit was when we got to the subject of how we share our traumatic experiences with the people we love, and that ever-sweet notion that yes, love is enough to tear down that wall of isolation. But the understated nuance of reality is that no, love is sometimes not enough, that sometimes healing those wounds takes more, which Dr. Winakur made a point of saying. I chimed in with my agreement, offering up my own examples of how difficult it is to talk with Angie about bad days in the hospital, and really, it's true of any bad history. It's why I write so much, I said.

Finally, I get home, and here I am at 1:23 AM, serially recalling Seattle and every other city I've left. What's funny is that each time I've left a place, I've always promised to come back and visit often, which has been far from the reality of things. Call it irony, my fixation on the past belying my physical avoidance of it.

There's this old Julieta Venegas song - "Me Voy," that we used to drink and sing to all the time in Brownsville. I have it on loop, and listening to it, I feel as if it could be my anthem for all the cities I've left growing up. Mostly because of this one line: Me voy. Que lastima, pero adios! "I'm leaving. What a shame, but goodbye!" I know it's really more of a breakup song, but I'd rather sing this for the cities of my past than the women of my past. I hear this song and I want to get drunk, go back to the house on Guadalajara St. for one more dance, find my friends who've all dispersed and shout for one more song, stand shoulder to shoulder with the men and women I've loved and forgive myself for the general stupidity of my youth. Julieta goes on and on in the background--"Porque no supiste entender a mi corazon." Good Lord. I'll probably be singing this when I leave Texas eventually.

Poems from Lago Enriquillo

Holding clinic in Sabana Real

The road to Sabana Real is cut from rock
and soil by secondhand motorcycles and the many feet
of many women carrying clay-colored vegetables.
We take in the mountain and its people like manna
from God, sustenance firmed in secret before sun
or water. The caravan stops twenty miles in,
a crowd of men and women, children and chickens
gather around a cinder block hut.

A man with swollen hands comes
from a far off sugarcane field for vitamins.
A woman finds she is pregnant with her fourth
child. We have bags of lollipops for the children,
but no shade for the elderly. A frail man coughs
weakly as we put on masks, fearing the worst.
Someone’s toe is infected. Someone’s knee
is crooked. Someone’s baby is starving.
Someone is waiting, someone is watching,
someone is saying “The American doctors
are here with free pills.”

And the boys' feet are caked in mud and their guts
are filled with worms. But they laugh too,
and play, and terrorize the windows
with little furious hands and fingers—boys
who have appetites for lollipops but not soap.
And the girls squeal in delight under the squeeze
of a blood pressure cuff, run out with our butterfly
stickers on their eyelids. Perhaps the world
is not such a mystery.

Or is it? In the airport, I look for postcards
for my mother and father. The plastic rack
has pictures of palm trees and phrases
like "Carribean Paradise." No pictures
of the Haitian woman to whom I gave
a sack of granola bars, the girl in her arms,
or the one clutching her hemline.
Nor the tree canopy from the side of the mountain
road to Sabana Real, the children chasing down
our swaying truck of students and supplies.

I seal up these images in a place
that’s not home. And then, on the back, what
would I write? Maybe something bittersweet,
like "Having a great time, wish you were here."

Above La Descubierta


Back home, I would have dreamt
of these stars, the secret
wonder of being one body, sleeping
beneath them; the leveled rock path
leading up the mountain
and these unfamiliar constellations,
pouring out nameless loves and other
mysteries in droves as we go up.
Back home we were less deliberate.
Back home, no one got up before
daylight to climb into the coming
sun. It's that notion of how
provoking the new world can be,
because it's still new, and
because we might well be too.
It comes with a different craving
in the bellies of our hands,
our feet, a hunger for exhaustion
and the feeling of having earned
the windswept path we walk on.
It's not something we would have done.
Yet here we are, sweat-matted
hair in clumps, copper scours on
rubbed skin, bleating goats
muffled in the sound of our
breathing and nothing else: living
proof of ourselves, proof that we want
more of ourselves than we thought.

"Medium coffee, please"

There was a period in my life not long ago when I regularly spent 12 hours on the road each week. 6 hours from the valley to Houston, 6 hours back. My meals were taken in the parking lot of a Valero somewhere off highway 77, my car was covered in dust and dead bugs, my jeans smelled like cigarettes and B.O., and my best friends were John Mayer, Jimi Hendrix, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

I drove 6 hours in the dead of night to get to Houston, then 6 hours at the crack of dawn to get back 2 days later. A lot of people thought I was crazy, my mother most of all. My father thought I had a secret girlfriend in Houston. My boss thought I was a freeloading slacker.  My friends thought I was searching for something, which I suppose was as good a way to look at it as any. Things at that time seemed like an amorphous sea of shit, and I was looking for an anchor. Friday afternoon, I'd sit down in lab meeting, grind my teeth for a couple hours, and roll out without a second look back at the office. Throw some clothes into a bag, throw the bag into the car, and pull out of Sugar Tree Lane, saying "Hey I'll see you in a couple days" to my roommates, not knowing whether I'd hold true to that. So I drove the hell out of my car, which earned my respect and gratitude as the most reliable thing I'd ever owned in my 25-year lifetime.

And what did I find? What did I learn? Well gas ain't cheap, for one thing. Cops trying to make quota at the end of the month don't let you off with a warning, for another. Spend enough time alone and eventually you'll either start talking to yourself or to God. Having a destination motivates you to keep going, even if trivial. The return trip always feels longer than the departing trip.

Finally, unlit, grassy shoulders are the best place to see stars on the road at night. My favorite ritual during night drives was buying a coffee from Valero, heading down the road a ways and pulling into a truck stop. Turning off the car, stepping outside, lighting a cigarette and promising myself I'd never be too good to drink shitty, leftover gas station coffee. Looking back on that time, I still can't decide if I was searching for a way out or a way in.

Anyway, went to Valero and bought a coffee tonight, and that's what brought all this about. So I'm drinking to that and whatever stars I can see from the balcony in my new digs.




Cheers.