"That boy has such a good heart."
"Johnny? Yeah. He prays like five times a day. Gives all that shit up to God or whatever."

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

Origami Around

Kiana Khansmith

Love Begins
we're not kids anymore.

izzy's playlists!
art blog(derogatory)
RMH
trying on a metaphor
Not today Justin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
AnasAbdin

JBB: An Artblog!
Keni
Jules of Nature
Sade Olutola
DEAR READER

ellievsbear

roma★

#extradirty

seen from Canada
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from Switzerland
seen from Türkiye
seen from Slovakia

seen from United States
seen from Canada

seen from United States
seen from Brazil

seen from China
seen from Philippines
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Philippines

seen from Russia
seen from Canada
@nasira-alanwar
"That boy has such a good heart."
"Johnny? Yeah. He prays like five times a day. Gives all that shit up to God or whatever."
Already
Can I still say that I never killed a man even if it feels like I once someone die? What’s the difference?
Every medic student sees a dead body eventually. A doctor will call a code after forty minutes even through the ribs stopped snapping a while ago. One morning, the engine crew will hold back laughter as you slowly shuffle into the bedroom of the old man who died last night ass, naked as old men tend to be, and place the limb leads to print out a monotonous strip of asystole. Maybe you started an ER clinical after the guy who hari-kari’ed himself is still in Trauma 1 and you wanna see if eviscerated intestines really look like sausages. There are too many opportunities to see a dead body before medic school is over, and if a para-maybe hasn’t seen someone dead before their eyes, well… that person is avoiding the sight.
Don't get me wrong. Dead bodies freak me out. There disconnect between their deadness and my aliveness is too much for my brain to comprehend. Once, I heard it was the basis for why most people are afraid of clowns and zombies. They look like us, but they're not us... not anymore.
I remember every dead body I’ve taken to the morgue, every full-arrest we declared at the hospital, every patient who looked me straight in the face and coded. I’ve seen death and dying, but I’ve never killed a man– not with my hands.
I’m sitting in the ambulance bay while I wait for a call, tucked inside the passenger seat of a rig. Tonight, the bay feels like a warehouse: cold concrete, the smell of diesel, rows and rows of ambulances freshly washed or on their last legs with their hoods popped and the engine gutted for repairs.
One of the perks of working with one of the managers is that I don’t have to post up the streets but get to hang back at the post and jump on the good calls: the ones that need extra hands, the messy ones, the fun ones.
A voice drops into the bay from over the intercom waking me from a half-assed doze. It’s shrill and echoes through the bay as unintelligible noise. “Tom!”, my manager and partner tonight, “GSW in Holdark.“ It repeats: “Tom, GSW in Holdark.”
I sit up at the first “GSW” and see Tom trotting over to the ambulance. He’s short and stocky, just like the baseball catcher he used to be with a matching high-and-tight salt-and-pepper haircut that makes me wonder if he was a Marine.
Tom slips the keys into the rig and cranks it. “I guess we’re going to Holdark!”
Stupid Holdark.
The rig stalls. Nothing good comes out of Holdark. My first day, a patient out of Holdark pulled a knife on me. I hate Holdark.
“This call sounds bad.” Tom winces as he leans into they keys trying to start the engine to this piece of shit ambulance. “I think they’re gonna need our help.” The engine grumbles to life.
“Did they say GSW?” I ask as we pull out of the bay.
When we pull up on scene, it’s surrounded by police cars. I jump out, and Tom lags behind me to grab the jump bag.
The smell of copper stings my nose before I even get across the street. I remember this smell: blood on asphalt.
A police officer steps onto the driveway with me. My gloves snap against my wrist as I pull them over my hands.
“What do you guys need?” I ask, throwing myself into the call.
Crime scene tape flutters against a breeze drawing the smell of blood further into the air. The smell fizzes in my head against adrenaline.
“We’re going to call it,” one of the medics says.
“He’s dead,” says the other. “He’s been shot more times than we can count.”
I’m expecting the patient to move, to sit up and shout, “Hey! No, I’m not! I’m just bleeding!” He has wounds all over his upper half, but neither of the medics holds pressure on anything. That’s when I notice the patient isn’t bleeding.
No blood spray, no oozing. There’s nothing but gravity pulling pools of his blood from his body down the driveway he lays against. No breath puffs out of his mouth or nose into the cold night air unlike for the rest of us standing around him.
The man is skinny and splayed out on the cold asphalt in one of those awkward positions only the dead fall into. It looks like a grim cartoon, and I have the thought to outline the guy with chalk to match. He’s still wearing his socks. They’re long and white and covered in blood.
An officer sighs. “He was running out of the house when the nephew shot him.” Blood feud.
Damn, I think.
He was killed. Damn.
His nephew did it. Damn it.
There’s nothing we can do. God, damn it. I put these gloves on for nothing.
Another officer walks over and shines a light onto the body we’ve all gathered around.
Yep, still dead, I think.
“How many times was he shot?” the officer asks.
We’re all inch closer to the body, as close as we can get without stepping in blood, each one of us tallying his wounds in our heads: the neck, the chest, one under this arm, one over here, one over there, another where his guts came out. I see six. One of the first crew mentions he can’t see the back but won’t move the body since it’s now a crime scene.
“Oh…” the officer says. A diligent pause. “How many times do you guys think he was stabbed?”
I look at the medics. The medics look at the officer. We look at the dead guy.
“Wait,” says the first medic, “He was stabbed?”
The officer moves the light from the dead man’s injuries to where the driveway meets the house. A knife sits in a small puddle of blood.
“Well, yeah”
“Then he was stabbed!” This would be funny if it wasn’t so gruesome. I bite my lip to stifle a chuckle. Sometimes bullet wounds look like stab wounds. Both bleed. Both get treated with direct pressure. Both can kill.
There are about three liters of blood on the ground and another soaking into the man’s jeans. He must have run out of the house only to bleed out in the driveway.
I sigh. Rough luck, man. I’m sorry.
I stroll over to where my partner is standing. He already knows the situation. This time, there is nothing for us to do. Tom pivots towards the dead body. Manny, one of the medics is knelt down beside the body gathering about twelve feet of cardiac printout which is still spewing out of the monitor. He wobbles, holding up the monitor as he struggles to avoid letting the strip drop into the blood pooled on the ground, let alone fall over himself into the puddles that are starting to congeal.
“What the hell is he doing?” Tom asks me but before I can answer, Tom shouts over to the medic. “What are you doing?!” This time, “the hell” is implied.
“I’m trying to get one without a heartbeat,” Manny shouts back.
My jaw falls open. What the fuck?
Catastrophe unleashes my mind into chaos. Alarm bells go off. Manny’s response echoes in my head and clatters against my thoughts. Dead people don’t have heartbeats.
“Shit,” Tom whispers.
Shit.
“Just leave it!” Tom shouts and with the next breath he lets a sigh out between tight jaw muscles. “Just go get the declarati
on!”
My eyes are locked onto a stream of blood making its way through a crack in the asphalt. I can see my boss through the corner of my vision, and imagine his thoughts are a mix of “You’re fucking kidding me!” and “I hope no one heard him say that”.
I start to rattle off rationalizations.
They’re probably agonal beats and aren’t compatible with life.
His wounds are too severe.
We’re out of trauma boundaries.
He’s bled out too much for us to fix.
Thought after thought flood into my head and my chest tightens against each breath I pull.
Not my patient.
Not my call.
Not my seniority.
Not my burden.
It feels like my burden.
I can’t move, not because I’m scared, but because I’m being pulled in too many directions at once. Start compressions on the guy. Pull out the cot. Scream in frustration. Hit Manny in the head with that stupid fucking cardiac monitor.
I blow a long breath through pursed lips. This feels like defeat. The rocker on my patch feels stupid now. “Paramedic,” it says, embroidered in green on white. Above it a symbol of an ambulance, a heart, the star of life, and a heartbeat.
He still had a heart beat.
Manny calls the hospital in the ambulance. Time of death: fuck-up-o’clock.
A firefighter walks over with a sheet and lays it down on top the body and spots of blood bloom against the starchy white.
Like CSI, I think. Then, I realize how close I am to a murder. This job is weird and right now it feels unreal.
I walk over to the rig where Manny’s partner is cleaning the cardiac monitor. She’s small, blonde, and wears glasses. This is the first time we’ve met. The wipes in her hand come away rusty red from blood after touching the leads.
“Do you need any help?” I ask.
She shakes her head and purses her lips to say “No,” but I take it as, “Not unless you’re gonna fucking un-kill the guy.” I take a quick scan of her face but I can’t read her emotions before she turn her back on me.
Keep turning your back, bitch.
“That was a bad call,” I say, trying to grab her attention and to open up a conversation. Blood, guts, death, defeat– this job sucks sometimes. If you consider the pay, this job sucks all the time.
She looks at me and blows a strand of hair away from around her eyes, bored, and rolls a shrug off her shoulders. “He was dead before we got here.”
I nod my head and turn on my heels. He was dead before we got here.
My partner motions for me to get back into the rig. There’s nothing we can do here so it’s back onto the streets for us. An officer snaps a stream of crime scene tape to let our ambulance bumble out of the cordon. I pull my seat into the dashboard and recline it back the precious inch and a half it gets, and I stare out the window. The roads feel too dark as sodium street lights push shadows across the dashboard.
Breathe in.
Don’t scream.
Breathe out.
Relax your shoulders.
Fuck.
“Does it ever freak you out…” I ask Tom, “seeing how people kill each other?” My voice sounds thick in the quiet nothing of the ambulance cab. It’s the same meek tone I had when I was a student: inexperienced, overwhelmed, confused.
Tom gives me some cynical, cheap answer which is both useless and callous.
“You get used to it.”
I lob my head in his direction.
You are so fucking worthless, Tom.
We keep driving away.
In the quiet moments of my life, I’m reminded of that body laying in the driveway and the smell of liters of blood on the ground.
He was already dead, I tell myself. I didn’t kill him. He was already dead.
S/cent
In-between the spread of gasoline
smoking rubber and summer night,
somewhere in the midnight hour
within this overpriced town,
(a village in a forest)
blood drips onto the asphalt,
and the splatter is the size of pennies.
The thing about that much blood--
aside from being shockingly unexpected--
is the assault of confusion upon my senses
crashes against my brain like a car into a tree.
(copper and ruby, clot and dye)
Youth is a cheap and precious thing
taken for granted just like pennies.
I strip my uniform for the second time today
and kick it into some abandoned corner of the room.
Pant leg over shirt and sock,
navy blue like the bruises on my knees tomorrow.
(fall to the ground like tears or rain)
As the fabric hits the floor,
so too i hear the sound of pennies.
Twenty miles and a whole sunset away,
my bed swallows me whole
and before slumber defeats me
that bottomless nothing, the void, exhaustion,
(“are you okay?”)
I take a deep breath
and it smells like pennies.
Let me be crystal clear: if you’ve faced a tragedy and someone tells you in any way, shape or form that your tragedy was meant to be, that it happened for a reason, that it will make you a better person, or that taking responsibility for it will fix it, you have every right to remove them from your life. Grief is brutally painful. Grief does not only occur when someone dies. When relationships fall apart, you grieve. When opportunities are shattered, you grieve. When dreams die, you grieve. When illnesses wreck you, you grieve. So I’m going to repeat a few words I’ve uttered countless times; words so powerful and honest they tear at the hubris of every jackass who participates in the debasing of the grieving: Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.
Everything Doesn’t Happen For A Reason — Tim Lawrence (via hereticnarrative)
Dreams- 11 Feb 2016 2:50pm
I go back to my apartment after classes today, peel off my clothes, and crawl into bed. My eyelids droop as soon as I curled into comfort. I need this nap, I think. Sleep overtakes me.
It’s summer– thick and heavy with long hours of daylight. The sun is low but not setting, and the angle of dewy sunlight passes through the trees in the distance; the sky is clear and a brilliant hue of blue. I think, God, this is beautiful as a breeze drifts through me. I’m standing on top of a fire engine– the same one from the house I had my internship. I’m not more than 10 feet above the ground, yet I feel gigantic. I feel high, not psychologically like I’m on drugs, or like I’m suspended in the air. I feel like an Amazonian-- large and strong. I breathe in the moment: the sun, the air, my youth, my strength.
I turn my face from the trees in the distance to face a man in his late twenties. I’ve seen him on TV, and he is beautiful. The sun glints off his blond hair. He keeps talking and says to me, “I’m auditioning for a role: a fire fighter.” He wants a ride along, I figure he’s asking me.
The voice of my thoughts switches to what my friends call “the ridicule voice”. I wanna do justice to the character. First responders have such a unique culture and they touch so many lives. They see so much. I wanna do things right. I want to look real. Fire men are sexy and I uhh wanna be sexy… And play with fire.
The ridicule voice has progressed into the caveman voice. Me man. Me do sexy man things. I feel my eyes cross and roll through my skull, yet I can’t blame him. Television shows a shitty version of us, daring and macho. I’d rather this fucker actually get a taste of what I devour each day.
The water-towers of each town start to sprout through the trees, each name painted boldly as I rattle off places that would take a rider. Familiar places, ones I drive through every day, ones my whole life has been set in. My cities. My towns. My places. My faces…
“Yeah, if you want a ride, I’ll see what I can do. I’ll talk to someone,” is my answer, and I see the actor smile. I roll my eyes again. At least he is excited.
I start to worry. What if they do him wrong at the other houses? What if they forget this isn’t this guys life– that he doesn’t know what to do and how to process the sights and sounds? Who’s going to tell him the truth about the world behind his safety and comfort? Who is going to ruin his reality? Who is going to show him the ugly side of everything? What if they forget how to show him the beauty?
I sigh, and turn my face towards the sun. It’s warm and pushes through my eyelids. How are we gonna fuck up this guy too?
Tones go off even though we are outside. I realize we are in a parking lot and it doesn’t make sense to me. Why are we hanging out in a parking lot? Am I at work? Why is the golf cart from my university’s EMS team here, and the fire engine from my paramedic internship? Who the fuck is my partner?
I don’t ponder on these questions. We have a call. I jump into the seat of the golf cart. The actor sits down too. He wanted a ride, and a ride he shall get.
My partner drives fast down an ally. The wheels spit up gravel behind us as we pass garages until we pull up to an open garage door with a plump lady standing in front if it. I jump out and make my way towards her while tying my hair up and pulling on my gloves. The actor follows behind me and I wonder how many protocols I am breaking bringing a rider with me to a call when he isn’t really my rider yet.
“Yea, so I called you for my son,” she drawls out as I follow behind her into the garage. I notice how calm she is. Most people are unhelpful flurries of nervous energy and panic. She is apathetic boredom. Her hair, long and braided, swings back and forth near her short, thick legs. She turns towards the middle of the garage and starts to pick through open cardboard boxes stacked on top each other, wasting my time. Impatience builds in the center of my chest. I’ve got a job to do lady, and that job needs a patient.
“Ma’am, where’s your kid?” I clip out through an increasingly tight jaw. I try to make it not sound like a bark.
She yawns. “He’s in the back yard.”
Jesus, I start thinking, Then why are we in the fuckin’ garage?
I shuffle my feet back through the boxes, swinging my hips to avoid clutter and almost clip my shoulder against the white siding of the garage door frame. I try with a lead-the-way sweeping hand gesture to get her to lead me towards the walk way next to the garage trailing into the yard. After all, it isn’t my house and I don’t know where I’m going. My eyes drag back towards her, the little lump of a lady still leafing through a box in the garage. She is completely disinterested. Thanks for your help.
As I start turning towards the small metal gate to the yard I ask, “What’s wrong with him?”
Before I can get a response from the box focused mama, I hear the voice of a young lady. My first impression is that she must be around my age. My ears prick as I hear the panic she sends with each shout of, “Here! Here! Help!” I can imagine her hand waving like bystanders do when panic sets in and they start shouting, freaking out. I don’t get sight on the voice ever, but I hear her. “He is back here!”
Then the woman starts to bless me with her answer. “He’s not moving.”
I’m shocked. A deadpan Excuse me, and an exasperated Fuck are the two thoughts that flash through my head as my face drops. I pull back on the breath that threatens to leave me, and try to clamp down on my building panic. This kid is dead, I know it.
I dart my head to make eye contact with my partner and pass my hand back trough the pick up trucks where we came through to get into the garage. My feet fumble over each other as I hasten to get to the yard. Before speaking, I augment my voice so that it sounds calm, even to my own ears. I have to sound in complete opposition to the anxiety that just slammed a dark chasm through me.
“Go get the cardiac monitor,” I say, stark and commanding, and the dream cracks.
My eyes snap open. Reality: a twin bed, a desk, a lump of duvet kicked into a corner by my feet. I’m alone: in this apartment, in this mood, in the constant circumstance of my sanity banging against the cage of my imagination. I draw an inhale and it feels particularly uncomfortable, even though my heart isn’t wasn’t knocking in my chest like all the other times I’ve slammed awake from a dream.
I feel overwhelmingly disconnected. From laying on my side where my face is pressed into the pillow, I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling, blank and cracked, giving way to an oscillating, plain ceiling fan. I focus on the string hanging from it-- the light switch. It rocks back and forth against the rhythm of the blades. Somewhere in the ether wisps of anxiety float away from me.
Lucky
The tones drop: “Remington Fire Department to the intersection of 5th and Archer for the car crashed into a pole.”
It’s three in the morning. Tones for a car accident at three in the morning mean only a handful of things: drunk drivers, stolen cars, terrible traumas. Fuckin’ losers.
Tonight, I’m partnered with someone who doesn’t drive. That’s why I’m awake when the tones go out. Our ambulance is one minute away from the intersection. I click my tongue as I close tonight’s tactic for mindfulness and therapy: a coloring book of flowers. A case of colored pencils is stuffed back into my backpack, and then I reach for the traffic vest behind my seat and buckle up before I push the gas.
Surely, as I pull around the corner, there is the pole with a black sedan rammed into the base of it, the hood crumpled and scrunched down the middle. The windshield is a glittering mess of broken glass. Both front doors are thrown wide open and I can see the airbags deployed in the driver’s and passenger’s seats, but there’s no one in the car. I’m relieved.
When I key up to dispatch, I tell them the situation is mild.
“We’re on a scene Fire and PD. One sedan versus a pole. Moderate damage, airbags deployed. Everyone is out.”
Hi, police department… I think as I step out of the ambulance and start walking towards the half-dozen officers on scene. My head shifts around looking for the patients. One of the firefighters points towards a cop standing with two boys. Literal boys. When I see their hands in cuffs, my brow furrows with confusion.
“Officer,” I start to ask. “Where are the passengers of that vehicle?”
He hooks a thumb to the pair of teenagers, and chuckles.
I turn my head back to look, again, at the car. It’s still wrapped around the pole.
No fuckin’ way. I’m incredulous at the though that these kids caused that car crash and got out unscathed.
Memories of another night stampede through my head: a teenage girl, the same age as my sister, holding the hand of her abusive, upset boyfriend as he runs into the street and directly into the path of innocent driver who couldn’t have seen it coming until her hood is dented and broken windshield covering the asphalt at 3am, just like the couple– his scalp split open and two broken legs which will probably never be able to run again, arterial blood spraying out of her open humeral fracture and onto the boots of a well-prepared police officer as he cranks his aid kit’s tourniquet.
My preceptor tells me I looked like a deer in headlights when I confusingly fumbled out of the ambulance they forgot me inside and into the hoard of paramedics and police that night. I wonder what I look like reliving that scene over and over again in my sleep or the quiet moments of my day, like washing the dishes or trying to remember what it feels like to breathe without focusing on the feeling of my breath through my nostrils and into heaving lungs set on fire with panic. I figure I look like a mess when my knees buckle and my legs give out under me, letting my small figure fall onto the floor, sobbing alone, water falling over the soapy plates as I’m assaulted by my memories, forced to relive the worst I’ve ever seen and felt.
As quick as the flashback comes, it goes, and the high pitch whine of terror in my head changes into the low drone of my pulse in my eardrums until the sound of a young police officer’s voice comes to my attention.
“They went on a joyride,” he explains, “ and they’re both minors.”
Great, I think before annoyance over the whole scene creeps up my back.
Minors can’t sign a refusal for transport to the hospital, and that they went on a joy ride and are wearing cuffs means they are in police custody, which means that tonight the ambulance is the taxi to the emergency department. That’s all the explanation I can will myself to understand because, when I get the boys into the ambulance, I’m becoming increasingly overwhelmed with anger I can’t condense.
I gesture towards the bench seat for the pair to park themselves as my partner takes their information. Tonight, he is on paper work and I am taking vitals, doing interventions and driving, each useless call making me feel more and more like a taxi.
For each boy, I lay a hand on their wrist to check his pulses, strong with youth and adrenaline, their blood pressures in normal limits. Neither complains of anything when asked, and they don’t have any visible injuries on exam besides a scrapped palm and knee. When I ask about the abrasions, the more rowdy, or stupid– I can’t tell, of the two points his nose at the officer outside the ambulance, and says, “That motha’fucka did it when he tackled me.”
My anger at the boys crackles under my skin.
“You watch your mouth!” I snap into his face, one foot away from mine as he sits on the bench and I on the stretcher.
With that phrase, one more straw goes on the back of the camel that is going to break with how old I feel.
I’m twenty, I remind myself. Twenty years under my petite belt, three months under my medic license. I’m still so young, so why do these kids look like little boys? Why do I feel so old?
I sigh, and continue to look over the boys for anything that might make this call not feel like such a test of my patience but more a challenge for my skills as a paramedic. No IVs for these guys. No backboards. No splints. Just stupidity, scraped palms, and rashes from where the airbags hit the boys in their young faces. They don’t even have acne.
Tonight, it’s just my anger multiplying.
“You have glass in your hair,” I note, monotone and dull, with matching blinks of boredom to stifle my anger.
You know… from where the windshield broke as you crashed the car you stole.
Each boy bends forward and tries to dislodge large grains of glass out of his think, short, tightly coiled hair with the one free hand that isn’t cuffed to the railing of the stretcher mounted on the floor. With a soft hand, I help them, and when it is over and I look into their eyes and share with them one of my calmer thoughts, as opposed to the others which are to yell into the vast nothingness of a sky with no stars because of light pollution, or to kick the tires and double over with screams of rage.
The extent to which I’m angry is starting to confuse me. Where did all this come from. Surely, these two kids couldn’t have caused me to be this mad.
“You guys were lucky tonight,” I say.
The one I told to watch his mouth hasn’t taken my advice and continues to answer me as if I was talking with him instead of to him. He huffs with arrogance earned from living in one of the shittier suburbs of the large city bordering the town we are in. Us and the busted car stolen for a joy ride and into a stationary pole at 3 am. Stupid idiot.
“It ain’t shit, man,” he says.
I lunge my torso from the hips at the back-talker, and snap “I am not your fucking ‘man’!” through clenched and bared teeth into his face.
He clamps his mouth shut and I hear his teeth click before I decide I’m fed up.
Fuck this.
I toss the band-aids into his face, get up and hop out of the back doors of the ambulance. Then, I slam them shut. The thud the doors make matches the knocking I feel inside my chest from my heart beating like a feral, taunted animal.
A huff of breath out of my hot lungs doesn’t make me feel better. Neither does pulling long sighs and shaking my head. Definitely, walking over to the busted sedan and pulling on the seat belts doesn’t help. Having them come with me as I tug downwards on them throws kerosine on an already flaming anger.
When a car gets into an accident and the airbags deploy, mechanisms in the seat belts snap to tension and lock the seat belts in place. They dangle, limp and lifeless, when unclipped or sometimes cut, to get to their passenger, unless they weren’t being used.
They didn’t even wear their seat belts.
I huff and grumble as I walk towards the driver’s seat of the ambulance and grip the steering wheel with white knuckles.
The drive to the hospital is slow. I take no rush since neither of the boys are hurt except for their pride. I don’t want to lose the police car following us either.
The ambulance bay shelters me from the wind but not the cold as I open the back doors to the ambulance. The officer briefly unhandcuffs the boys from the railing of the stretcher mounted to the floor only to then handcuff the boys to each other.
“You serious, man?” the loudmouth of the pair asks with disappointment. Here, another wound to his fragile masculinity.
For a moment, I’m relieved of the hot anger that throbs behind my sternum, and a bright laugh bubbles out of me.
“That’s cute,” I comment.
“Friendship bracelets,” says the officer.
A nurse guides the pair, my partner behind them and then the officer and I, still chuckling, to the room at the end of the ED reserved for either psychiatric evaluations, violent patients, or those in police custody. My partner gives the nurse a report outside of the room, and inside there is nothing but a gurney, dumb-and-dumber, the officer, and myself. Myself and my exponentially growing rage.
I’ve stopped laughing now, and the tension in my neck reminds me why I’m so angry.
My mother has a pressure cooker with a metal top that hisses and rocks back and forth when the inside is hot enough. Bursts of steam would shoot out of it with every oscillation. I was absolutely amazed by it as a child but never understood the danger of the pressure trying to explode behind it or the burning heat contained inside. One time I tried to play with the top, which looked like a toy shuttling back and forth. My mother yelled at me, and I never tried to lay my hands on that pot again.
Tonight, I feel like that pot. My hands would shake if they weren’t balled into my front pockets to prevent me from battering the next person to slight me in the smallest way.
No one in the room speaks, and yet there is the shrillest noise in my ears. I look at the officer and then to the kids. My mouth feels dry, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it before I start letting go on the grip pining the anger inside me to the back of my ribs. With a calmness mustered by the strength of God, I ask the officer how old he thinks the boys are.
He’s going to be here for the night, probably after his shift is over because he will have to wait for his relief, and the annoyance works its way into a wrinkle on his forehead.
“Fourteen and fifteen,” he answers. I’m sure he took their birthdays for the police report.
These boys are fourteen and fifteen years old. My pulse throbs between my ears.
Because he is clearly socially deviant and stupid, the one who keeps talking back dares to include himself in the conversation I’ve begun with the officer. Clearly, he doesn’t see the rage I feel lighting up my body.
“Nah man. We fourteen.”
I snap my face towards him as if to say ,“You shut the fuck up! Right now!” His recoil shows me he understands.
“They’re both fourteen,” I say. I know how old they are. I heard their birthdays, but hearing someone else state the fact of their ages makes me feel disconnected.
“So you lied to me?” the officer spits back at the kids. It’s well into 4 am, and I feel the weariness of the hour behind the fizz of my anger. The kids are now shouting over each other at the officer. “We ain’t lied to no one!“ and, “You didn’t listen to us!”
Shut the fuck up, you handcuffed little shits.
“They’re fourteen,” I shout to no one in particular inside these barren walls. “They told me. Look at them.”
I wave my hand at the pair and wonder if they’ve ever been yelled at before, or if their stupid actions of the night are the result of a lack of authority figures in their life. Either way, the hold on my anger has become so weak that my voice is heavy, as opposed to its usual shrill when I get charged about something.
I snap back to the kids, sitting on each side of the end of the gurney. Their feet dangle, and I continue.
“Anyway, I don’t give a shit. You guys are 14! I have brothers and sisters your age!”
“They don’t care!” the officer tries to tell me. In this moment, my frustration is obvious to the officer, and he fades away into the background as I start to pour out my rage.
“You guys are fourteen?” I ask in a quiet anger now, which is a dangerous level of mad, and I’m scared at how calm I sound. I look to the corner of the room, click my tongue, and continue.
“You guys are fourteen, and you guys are lucky.” The hardened walls I built around myself are coming down now. My nostrils are flared, and I’m pointing with the gesticulation of anger and firm conviction I was raised with.
“You know who else is lucky? Me. I’m lucky.” My finger point to my chest, and it feels sharp enough to ground me to this room instead of flying off at the handle.
I see the kids look at me, confused. The “how is this about you, lady?” remains unspoken.
Fuck these kids.
“I got lucky today. You know why? I got lucky today because I didn’t have to pick up bits of your bodies off the road tonight.”
Here it is. You’re gonna learn today, assholes.
“Little bits… of your face, of your brain, of your skin from that road. That much blood, that smell, it stays in your nose for the rest of the day.”
The loudmouth stays quiet, and his friend’s eyes go big with the shock of my words. If only you knew, kid, how fucking lucky you are.
“I don’t care what you wanna do with your lives. I don’t care what you do in the middle of the night. You wanna go steal cars? Go steal cars! I couldn’t give a single shit about you guys!”
I see the officer shift in the corner of my vision and can feel his disbelief that I have the balls to talk about these poorly kept secret thoughts of public servers.
This is the shit we "don’t take home.” I take it home, and fuck you if you honestly think you don’t. We all take it home, either with the bottle, ruined relationships, or broken sleep, wracked with nightmares or imaginary tones going off. Maybe we just hate ourselves instead of the world. Maybe it’s the anger that doubles every minute, like a structure fire, inside our veins– inside me right now.
“But don’t think for a single moment you guys are sitting here because you’re not lucky! Lucky that you stole a car in the middle of the night. Lucky that you guys were driving when no one else was driving either! Lucky that you crashed where no one was standing because it’s night time and people went home! You could have killed someone else! You could have killed each other! You wanna kill yourselves? Fine! Go ahead! But how dare you put yourselves someplace where other people choose to exist!”
I feel so old.
“I am twenty-one.”
I don’t feel twenty-one.
“I’m a kid! You guys are fourteen, so you’re babies! I’m young, and I want to live a happy life!” That thought echoes in my head: I’m young, and I want to live a happy life!
I could be crying right now. I’m already shattering, and there’s nothing I feel like holding back.
“I don’t need to have nightmares about picking you guys up off the road! I don’t need to see your face when I go to sleep! I don’t want to be forced to remember your face because of the horrible things that happen to your bodies when they go flying through a windshield! And, God forbid it doesn’t look like these faces I’m yelling at right now!”
Everyone in the room is still, but me. I feel like I could shoot through the roof of this hospital.
“I don’t need to look at my brothers and sisters and be reminded of you!” I’m so fucking done with everything right now. Fuck these kids. Fuck this call. Fuck this shift, this job. Fuck all of this!
I spit out the next sentences and hope to them they feels like nails from a gun, into their coffins for their stupidity, or into their hearts.
“You guys got lucky tonight, and the thing about luck– it runs out.”
My head is roaring by the end of my tirade. If the room had a door, I would have slammed it shut and stomped away, but as I turn away from the boys and storm out of the room, my eyes, probably bloodshot with fury catch a glimpse of the police officer. I hear him say something in approval of my rant, my lecture– the absolute unburdening myself. “Good for you!” or “That’s how it’s done!”
You can shut the fuck up, too, I scoff.
The place where I was dense with exasperation feels hollow now. I’m tiered, both emotionally for this call and for the hours dragging through dregs of this shift.
I wash my hands at the nurse’s station and refuse to look at myself in the mirror that is the aluminum of the napkin dispenser. Rage burns, and it is ugly, and I don’t need to deal with the image of my own anger right now. I can’t. Tonight, I am barely keeping myself glued together.
I grab a glass of ice water and down it in breathless gulps. I refill my, chomping on ice cubes, and fill another cup with water for the police officer in some form of bribery for him to both stay quiet about my unraveling, and to thank him for being there despite it all. Going back to that room feels like taking paces through thick mud.
When I show through the doorway, the loudmouth refuses to look at me, and the other only makes brief eye contact as I enter the room. I’m sure if either had tested me, I would have lunged at them and absolutely lost my resolution against physical violence, probably my job and clean record on top of that.
I give the officer the water with a shaking hand, a residue of my emotions. He seems thankful. I think we both understand how I felt tonight. Maybe, we both are in the same place: in our twenties, in a job we wanted and trained for, absolutely taken back with the shock of scenes we never expected and the incapability to handle everything at once. How does one learn how to take in all the good, the bad, the trauma, the excitement, the exhaustion when it clatters down like the spray of a fire hydrant?
“What time is your shift over?” I ask. I don’t know why I’m striking a conversation. I think it is because I don’t want him to think I’m crazy. I am crazy.
“Seven,” he replies. “You?”
“Six. I’m getting out before you.”
Maybe I’ll get out of it all… just quit all this ‘paramedic’ bullshit.
I go back to the ambulance, stuff my body in the front seat with my knees pulled up and braced in-between by ribcage and the steering wheel. I return to my coloring book and wait for my partner to finish report so I can get the fuck out of this place.
Today, I got lucky.
Today, luck feels a lot like an electric whip of anger.
Miguel Leal - Broken Hearts
4 Humours, obra de la diseñadora rusa Irina Sidorova. Basado en la teoría de los cuatro humores, desarrollada como una teoría médica por Hipócrates.
Human Organs Created from Flora
English artist Camila Carlow created these lovely renderings of human organs by foraging for wild plants, weeds, and the occasional animal part and then sculpting and arranging these various bits of flora. Her series, entitled “Eye ‘Heart’ Spleen,” represents images of organs such as a heart, lungs, stomach, uterus, liver, and testicles, demonstrating the reflection of internal biological structures with external natural structures. From Carlow’s site,
“This work invites the viewer to regard our vital structures as beautiful living organisms, and to contemplate the miraculous work taking place inside our bodies, even in this very moment.”
You can order prints and keep up with this particular project’s developments via its Facebook page.
employer: so how do you like working here!
me:
When your patient asks if you’ve done this before
So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays With Morrie (via idayumumtaz)
The things that get you...
… after a long hard day. Usually, it doesn’t get you at work. You hold it together and you work hard and you stay nearly 2h late without even thinking about it, because your colleagues need all hands on deck when a patient suddenly seriously deteriorates at handover time. And it’s only afterwards, when you get home that you realise how long it was since you ate or drank. And it’s only when you’re sitting watching some average-ish interpretation of A Christmas Carol and they get to the scene where Bob Cratchit’s family quietly reference a missing family member, that it hits you. The smallest burdens are the hardest to bear. And you cry like a baby about a fictional child dying, not because you can’t eparate fiction from reality. But because you know how close this reality is, for someone out there. You know parents who’ve lost children. You know colleagues who have fought in vain to save lives extinguished long before they should have been.
And tonight, you know your team came close to losing. Sometimes, it’ll be days, or years after something, but something innocuous will set off a flashback from work which makes you think or changes your mood. Today, I was thinking about something silly and having a normal conversation when something reminded me of the first person I saw die; it wasn’t a traumatic experience, as such. But it did move me deeply and I feel strongly about it even still. And sometimes, you’ll be watching the news and you realise the horrific reality of life for so many people in the world. Of course you want to help (that’s what you do), but it’s overwhelming to realise the scope of yet another problem so much vaster than any one person can solve. I cried when I heard about the bombing of a children’s hospital in Syria; there can be no justification for something like this. I heard about the NICU babies who had to be evacuated from the incubators and rescuscitaires to be saved; I hope against hope that they are somewhere safe now. If I could ask anyone to do two things, it would be these: Hug your loved ones. We take life for granted, but enjoy the everyday moments in your life, because they are the ones that matter. And lastly, if you can, please donate to a charity which works towards helping those in Syria, particularly the children. It doesn’t have to be the ‘regular’ charities. I’m OK; everything that happened above wasn’t actually tonight, it was a little while ago. But I feel this is a side of medicine that needs to be shared. Working in a job where you care for others has effects that others can’t always see. But I suspect it affects us all, in different ways.
Sometimes you don’t get closure. You just move on.
Unknown (via wordsnquotes)