I had a blood infection, it was scary.

The window reveals the setting son of some last hallucination. While I sit connected to an I-V. I was watching the orange and yellow sky—the bright and endless night of a closing day. A world that will no longer in the revealing of its glory to me, welcome my soul into it. Its dance of light or phantasmagoria of terrors to my wounded reality.

"What are you doing?" says the robed older woman standing in my doorway at the UT medical center.

 

"I am very sick," I said. "I am dying, I think."

 

"No," she says, "Not yet. You still have a few more days left before you, and I make our embrace."

 

I don't know who she is, but my teeth are hurting, and I am not thinking very clearly—my hand holding the I-V is sitting on the armrest of a chair in the corner of the dark. I was working on a book, but it does not seem so important right now. So very necessary as anything else.

 

My feet are swelling from the twelfth bag of antibiotics that is slowly dripping in a chain from bag to wire, then arm into the toxic blood manic in its need to kill me. So I take my time trying to rest and heal, listening to the roaring scream of "Oh God! my knee!!!" from the room down the hall.

 

"That guy is making me uncomfortable," I tell the older woman in the doorway. "he is always screaming, and there is nothing I can do about it."

 

"well, you want me to close that door?" She said, her voice was like honey dripping into the coffee on a rainy morning.

 

There is a doll down the hall. She is my nurse. Jasmine takes my vitals every three hours. Her porcelain skin reflects the light from the bathroom—the lighting like some alien in the darkness. Oh, love, The life we believe in.

 

I hear her footsteps coming down the hall. I hear the death working its way into my existence. I hear the way the world will sound like when I am gone. There is a joy to find in the heart of our suffering. suffering isn't anything but its unique kind of joy. But still, I must emphasize this. Joy is the sound of a beating heart in the act of suffering.

 

I remember the rusted road.