Hedva

He rarely asked me questions, other than the perfunctory, “And how are we today?” The vague, elusive, imagined “we” of that sentence always felt like a large void that yawned open between us. Nonetheless I tried to insert myself into the conversation. “But how much will it cost?” “But I don’t want to do that.” It was a struggle of making myself not only have a presence, of making myself be seen and heard and understood, but of persuading him that mine was an important presence, one that mattered, one that he had to consider as much as I had to consider his.

A note I wrote down in the hospital: “What am I doing here? Malingering, lingering.” Being chronically ill often feels like all I really have, which is to say all that I own, is radically temporary—a lump of painful, decaying, remembering matter whose existence is composed of different strategies for lingering.

In our last meeting, on the day I was released, he told me, “You’ve made a tremendous accomplishment.” It made me laugh. “My tremendous accomplishment is that I didn’t kill myself?” I said. Yay-Crew made a gesture then, a little bow of the head, an opening of the hands in my direction, that I’ve tried to interpret but I still can’t say exactly what it meant. It felt a bit parental, go forth now, my child, I trust that you will be okay. He told me that I could always come back.

Johanna Hedva