Flush

Drunk. Nighttime. Stagger into the bathroom. Urinate. Relief mixed with malaise. Unsteady, rocking on my heels as the sound of my outpouring splashes into the bowl. Look down. Motion. 

The fluttering wings of a moth in its death throes, treading water in erratic circles in the toilet, swimming into mountains of bubbles created from my piss. 

Suddenly, I feel overwhelming empathy for the moth. Its plight ripples.

But what can be done? Go plunging into the can with my bare hands to fish the moth out, setting it on the toilet seat for its wings to dry? 

Or acknowledge that life is suffering, and flush?

This isn't even my house.

"Sorry, buddy," I said, with one last drunken, baleful look. "I know how you feel." 

Flush.

Sitting in my car in a parking lot outside of a bar. I can't remember why I was there. I think meeting friends. But why am I waiting in my car?

Sounds on-theme for me, actually.

In any event-- I'm watching people coming out and going inside.

The usual crowd you'd expect to see coming and going out of a bar. 

After a while, a woman storms out.

Pretty, but brutal. The kind of woman who maybe lived a quarter of her life in a bar.

But she's pissed.

She storms across the parking lot, walking straight toward my car.

A sudden flash of anxiety. She couldn't be coming toward me, looking like that, could she?

She stormed toward my car, and for a brief moment she even made eye contact with me, but the intensity of her furious anger didn't dissolve for a second before she turned and entered into the passenger seat of the car immediately to my left. She slammed the door and threw her back into the chair. I didn't dare look at her-- I could feel her seething.

Seconds later, another figure emerged from the bar. A man. Looking sullen. Slowly, he crossed the parking lot-- walking in our direction. 

This was him, I thought-- and he was in trouble. What had he done? Taking out a cigarette from my pack, I rolled my window down and pressed the lighter down in my car console-- heating the coils. The man eventually stepped up toward his driver's seat. My lighter clicked-- hot and ready-- and I pulled it out and pressed the glowing red end against the tip of my cigarette, singing the paper and igniting the tobacco.

He opened his door, and she was ready. As soon as he opened the driver's side door, she screamed at him:

"You have Chlamydia?! What the FUCK?!" 

Sheepishly, he sat down and closed the door, as I puffed on my cigarette.

Guys always have to work on their communication skills. 

I don't think I ended up going in that bar.

Walking through an emergency room. My grandmother was in bed 4. Again. This time she had been found by a friend on the floor. Her son, my uncle, who has lived with her for years, had allegedly stepped over her body on his way out the door earlier that day. She had been falling a lot lately. 91 years old. It happens.

Passing by some of the beds, you try not to look. But sometimes you don't have to look. Just by passing by, the subtle cues tell you everything you need to know. 

In one, the lights are off, and the sound of a woman crying softly on her bed inside. As I pass, I catch a brief, hushed word--

"Oh god, I'm so embarrassed. I'm so sorry!" 

Another voice with her, in the darkness, reassuring--

"Shh, it's okay. It's alright, you don't have to apologize--"

People have the hardest time accepting that they're forgiven. People insist that you must think less of them, because of an accident, because of illness. People apologize for dying. You can tell them over and over it's alright-- but they insist that they've failed you, somehow, through their own mortality. 

I arrive at my grandmother's bed. She had been my very best friend for my whole life. That isn't hyperbole. She was always there for me, and never failed me.

She had fallen, a few years ago, after a seizure that took away her ability to talk. To write. That part of her just wasn't accessible to her any longer, but it was still my grandmother, there, on the couch, in the house I spent every weekend growing up, watching movies with the volume turned all the way down. She was deaf anyway, it didn't matter. She had to watch them and figure it out without knowing what anyone was saying.

But she'd fall. And someone would find her, and ask what my uncle was doing there if he couldnt-- or wouldn't-- help her. 

"Why would he just step over her, like that," my grandmother's friend, Jackie, had asked me. "Why wouldn't he try to help her for god's sake?"

I arrived at room four and looked in. There she was. The little old woman-- 91 years. She held me when I was a baby. Now I was a tall man in a suit standing at the foot of her hospital bed. Her eyes were blood shot. She couldn't form words anymore. She knew I was there to see what I could do to help, or to comfort. But what could I do? 

She recognized me. Her mind was still "there," trapped without words. She could say little things-- "yes," "no," and "okay." She saw me, but I could tell-- this was probably the end.

"Okay," she said, her voice sounding clear but her frail body looking crumpled. "Okay," she repeated, nodding reassuringly, but impatiently. Somehow, I got the feeling that she wanted me to go.

"Can I get you anything?" I asked. "What do you need?" I wanted to help. I wanted to reciprocate after all the years of love and care she had given me when I needed someone most.

"Okay," she insisted, nodding, gesturing to the door. "Okay," she said, meaning for me to go. 

I had only just arrived. Why wouldn't she want me to be there?

What was the situation? What was her condition? Where was the doctor? What did it mean, and where would it lead?

"Okay," she whispered-- I remember how red her eyes were, but she didn't seem to want me to see.

"Alright," I relented, giving her little foot a tender squeeze under the thin hospital blanket draped over her. "You can call me," I reminded her. "I'll come. It's okay--"

"Okay," she said, looking relieved. 

"I love you," I said. "Okay," she replied, and turning, I left, and that was the last moment I was with her when she was still "there". The next time, she'd be gone-- not dead, but, not with us, either.

She knew. She knew the score. She knew this was it-- and, I feel sure, she didn't want me to remember her that way.

That's the only thing I can think of.

I walked out, back down the hall, past the dark room where the woman had wept.

It was quiet there, now, but I could still hear her breathing inside. In the dark. With her friend. Hoping for forgiveness, ignoring that it had already been granted.

Walking with friends.

California.

Beautiful, perfect, splendid California. 

The weather is always just so.

Walking with friends, freshly arrived, here in my new home in California.

What a great place to be. 

The smell of the ocean nearby. Sun shining brightly. Flowers and trees are in bloom. 

An easygoing, carefree energy on the streets-- everyone caught up in their own little thing.

Laughing and joking-- just having a subtle and subdued kind of ball.

When the smell emerges and punches you in the chest like buckshot from a shotgun blast.

You smell it first, and then you see it.

A man, in rags, turned away, curled into the fetal position against the side of a building--

--his pants, all the way down, and a runny thick dark liquid trailing out onto the sidewalk leading to his dirty ass cheeks--

Flies akimbo. Unmoving. God, is he dead?

But you're walking, with friends, so fast-- and they're not stopping-- so you lift up your feet and step over...

The thick pool of human waste that's running thin, painting the streets...

And before you know it, you and your friends are leaving the man-- was it a man?-- far behind.

You look around, no one has batted an eye.

California. 

Beautiful, perfect, splendid. California.

The weather is always just so.

Walking with friends, freshly arrived, here in my new home in California.