The E.R. Volunteer

The Words:

swoosh, distantly heard, blossom, flapping in the wind, fun, renewal, hearts, cell phone, portrait of the artist, atmospheric, soporific

**

I am not the type of man who distantly heard some secret and now holds it safely wrapped up between my hearts chambers. Secrets are hardly soporific. They swoosh even when you think silence is true. But they look at me funny now, all these people who love me. They love me because I belong to them, because there are no renewals when a mother holds her child to her warm breasts.

But she didn’t love me like that, her. She came like a blossom flapping in the wind of coincidence, and stuck on my shirt somehow. She knocked and let herself in, a neat bun collecting her long, black hair back. It made me want to laugh a little, that glowing face with huge eyes and beautiful lips and the grandma style bun. And when she asked if I wanted a straw to sip my Seven-Up, I nodded.

Because what did she know?

She couldn’t know. She couldn’t know that for years now, I had watched them disappear in bulbous lumps. She couldn’t know about the fight my mother and father had before getting here, about no insurance, no ID’s, no records. She couldn’t know the dreams I had been having, of IV’s, and blood, and closing my eyes for a long, long, long time.

So I nodded, for fun. And she brought it, straw and all to my lips. And I couldn’t open them. They were gone. Sealed.

She put the can down, her eyes traveling around my face and neck, sad, devastated.

“How long has is been since you’ve eaten?”

I shrugged. 3 days, I wanted to tell her.

She left and came back with a blanket. She covered my parents, sleeping there on the hard chairs. They were tired. And they didn’t know a silver of English. She came up, her nose an inch away.

“May I touch them?”

I could tell she was afraid. Afraid of the atmospheric tension that might explode if I took it all wrong.

I nodded.

She touched my forehead first, fingers slowly falling down the bridge of my nose, then rising again to stencil in my eyebrows. With both palms, she held my cheeks and suddenly, mine were meshed with hers.

Gentle. Crude. Pure. Diseased. Sweet. Tasteless. Tender. Hardened.

Lips.

When she looked at me again, I was crying. For her. For me. For lips.

But they look at me funny now, all these people who love me. Confused, sad, unknowing. Like looking at a portrait of the artist and wondering why the nose was too long when in life it was perfect. But they are watching me go away as I press speed dial 2 on the cell phone of life to replay that one last kiss.

I close my eyes, and smile.

Lipless.