Variations on the Idea of Living

Northside Hospital: Atlanta, Georgia [Dying Woman Isolated] in a sterilized square accidentally makes her rainy-day-game-playing-family laugh when she slurs loopy observations and pretends her stool softener medication is a shot of Jager. A nurse interrupts the fifth tie-breaking game of Uno to announce (with no sympathy) that the woman is ineligible for the chemo that could save her life. Her three daughters crumble. their shoulders shake and seize chests swell and mascara runs and they wipe snot from each other’s cheeks with stretched out sweater sleeves. Their mother asks if they are going to be okay and then wonders aloud about who won Uno. The middle daughter runs home and grabs a shoebox full of old photographs and drives through McDonald’s on the way back to the hospital to pick up three large orders of French Fries. And she sits in a circle with her sisters on sea foam green tiles s p e ckled with lavender and they pull out photos and remember memories. bad hair cuts and platform heels first cars first limo first funeral first angel petty fights Miss. America pageants and queso the prom where it rained the prom where you got dumped the day we thought there’d be a blizzard but it was just flurries. (school was still canceled and we felt silly for stocking up on milk and bread.) South Forsyth High School: Cumming, Georgia Young girl feels younger acts older and tries too hard not to be cliché. Thoughts spiral around her head but they all sound like they came from a self help book or an episode of Oprah or a Pop song she hates in the presence of the other kids, but sings in her car at the top of her lungs. She hopes no one can hear her thinking. Thinking of firsts. Wondering about seconds. Her eyes cross and vision blurs while she gnaws on her cuticles until they bleed and she wedges her hands under her so she stops looking so insecure while she thinks about how her first drink was an accident spiked Quik Trip Icee tasted like conformity. First kiss in front of cool kids couldn’t stop smiling or blushing or biting her bottom lip and wondering what kind of beautiful he meant when he said she was. The first time her mom told her not to care about those girls who whisper and stare and snicker about those girls whose first kisses happened when her first diet happened those girls who drank beer out of Starbucks cups and whose hair never frizzed. Her first cigarette made her puke her first SAT scores made her puke. She accepted her first acceptance to college. The one that was the farthest away fromhome and the first person she told laughed. But she knew it would be better (there.) 300 North Orleans Street Chicago, Illinois I like living in a bubble but sometimes it closes in and it hurts and I can’t breathe and my mind races and fight or flight becomes: get me the hell out of here. Lost meant tears and security guards and report to the Mickey Mouse station when I was six and lost meant the nightmare I used to have and the way I felt when I fell asleep on my dad’s shoulder but woke up in my own room. when I was eight and lost meant open fences and flyers and roller blade search parties when I was twelve. Lost meant a television show that I didn’t watch when I was seventeen and lost meant disappearing meant blending in to smoky smelling commuters and legless homeless men on the State Street bridge and the gangster who I assumed would steal my bag. I use my GPS to find directions to get lost in a nice part of town by a bakery maybe or a hair salon. The first time I actually got lost in the city I was disoriented and didn’t know which way NORTH was. I did not have enough money to hail a cab and a homeless man told me I looked pretty. His compliment gave me anxiety, so I smoked my first cigarette of the day and made my first eye contact of the day with a mother and her baby and she shook her head at me while we waited at the crosswalk and she warned me (about cancer.)