#NaPoWriMo #Day24 #HoldingPattern #OffPrompt

Holding Pattern

I’m eating a Jamaican vegetable patty.  

It tastes normal,  

and that feels wrong,  

because my world is upside down.

I’ve left her bedside.  

I know it’s sensible  

to rest, to eat, to bathe.  

But how can I eat a patty  

when the world is upside down?

I want to be at her bedside.  

I’m afraid to leave.  

Every crow I see  

caws definitively 

is it a battle omen,  

a harbinger,  

or just a crow being a crow?

Friends ask what I need.  

I ask for scraps of poems,  

to cobble together a road map  

through this place  

where nothing points north.

I keep thinking of cats,  

meowing to come in or go out,  

never satisfied,  

always torn between doors.  

That’s me.  

Inside. Outside.  

Wrong either way.

I listen to podcasts about recovery.  

I scroll Facebook and a Timehop reminds me  

I posted about what happens  

to the brain when we die —  

that it floods with a million  

happy memories.  

Please let that be true.  

Please let her be warm with them.

I text cousins and aunts.  

I busy my hands  

while the crucial 48 hours  

count themselves down.  

We’re 24 hours in.

I’m torn between sitting at her bedside  

and not wanting to get in the way  

of the people trying to keep her here.  

My traitor eyes won’t stay stoic.  

I know it hurts her to see me cry.

I’ve come home  

to collect photo albums,  

and things to read aloud,  

because they say you can still hear.  

So I will speak.  

I will tell her she is loved.  

I will keep vigil,  

even when I step away.