I wonder why things have to be this way. There are walls in this house beyond the ones you can see. But they are almost visible to me, shimmering darkly in the air with the fresh glow of old memories, layered like coats of paint year after year.

The year I was thirteen, we figured out my dad had been sick for the past two years. That night I was lying in bed, breathing shallowly and listening intently. In the other room were the sounds of glass breaking on the floor and murmured voices. For as long as I can remember, I have always heard murmured conversation in the “other room.” There has been a constant discussion kept up between my parents whose contents I am only vaguely aware of but must sometimes involve me. They don’t realize it, but I am always listening and always observing; perhaps a tickle on their necks gives them the momentary sense of my watchful, glassy eyes on them, which they shiver off and unconsciously react to by speaking in a slightly lower whisper.

The faint rustle of clothes, then the tread of feet and bang of the door. Then...silence. I could stop pretending to be asleep.

The next day signalled the start of a never-ending “Hope you’re feeling better” for my father. I wondered, What does it feel like to have your own body betray you? We are so fragile, we humans; we fall apart so easily, and are constantly unravelling under the subtle pressures of time and chance. Inside all the people you see every day, all the people you know or love, are just organs and blood and tissue and bone. All these things can come undone, and in the end, they always do.

I’ve worked at hospitals before; sat behind the high counter in the front lobby, watching all these people go by and wondering about their stories and internal betrayals. A walking heart attack there (a pleasant-looking grandfather who perhaps had indulged in sweet delicacies a few times too often), terminal lung cancer lounging by the rest rooms, kidney stones moving awkwardly side by side down the polished length of room. And in the same few square feet of space, both being discharged at the same time, would be a beaming, rosy-cheeked mother still singing the plans for the new baby in her head and a patient who had given up the long and painful fight against his own mutating cells and now only waited to be taken back home where he would spend some months sitting in cold sunshine and remembering his children. I’ve seen them. We see them every day, all around us, the Ones Betrayed by Their Own Bodies. But it’s different, isn’t it? One day it will happen to you or one of yours, and then it won’t seem so distant anymore. Then you’ll know but never stop wondering why.

I hated going to the hospital to visit him. My mom was there constantly, but she had had all those years of murmured conversation with him and I hadn’t. We’d lost acquaintance with each other over the years, we who sat down at the same table every day. No one realized, I think, that I was trembling inside my skin, afraid to see what I would see in that white room at the end of the long corridor. No one could have understood why.

Standing there at his bedside, with the weak gray sunlight coming through the window and illuminating his weak gray features, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him, not even when my mother’s eyes, shiny and wet like twin black pebbles, often vaguely unsettling to me, urged me to say something, anything, that would make this moment more bearable in memory, words that were sweet, kind, caring, comforting, or supportive. Something that would show I wasn’t a complete ingrate. But I didn’t, and never did. I knew there must have been disappointment in the cold, hard look my mother had in her eyes. But I knew myself better than either of them did, and it would never have been like me to be anything other than the impossibly silent, awkward one.

I did what I always do; avoided their eyes, my mother’s stones and my father’s misty orbs, fixed them on a blank spot on the wall identical to all the other spots, a speck on the floor, anything that couldn’t look back at me. There was a hard lump in my throat and a feeling in my heart like a stone dropping down a well into miles and miles of darkness. I remember the shame, the feeling that I’d placed myself nearer the heart of cowardice than I’d ever done before in my life. I don’t know what cowardice is, really. Neither do I know what courage is; I just know it isn’t anything I have.

Drifting down the hallway, on both sides the pale sickly-looking walls enclosing me. The hospital smells of, I imagined, death and illness scrubbed clean with sterility. “Are you all right?” a nurse said, glancing up from her clipboard as she came from the other direction. “No. I don’t think so.” And I kept on walking until I reached a room where many people sat waiting in chairs and reading old magazines, and sat down next to a fat old woman with a furrowed brow. On the white wall directly opposite me were hung several framed pictures of the same pale gold flower, all lined neatly in a row. And immediately it came to me again:

“All in all, the clock is slow
Six colored pictures all in a row
Of a marigold”*

When I was a little kid, I used to believe that there was a room in a time far, far away from now, and it was white and had creamy framed pictures on the walls, and people waited there. Some people, after a time, went into a room beyond and never came out, and some people never went anywhere at all; they just sat there, looking at the patterned tiles on the floor, not knowing what they were waiting for but waiting because there was absolutely nothing left in the world to do except wait. Not everyone was waiting for themselves; some were waiting for others to go and come back. It was, I suppose, a little like a waiting room, the kind you’d find in a dentist’s office; perhaps it even had an aquarium, right in the center, with fish that looked exotic and well cared-for. I called it Room Number Thirty-Four.

When he got out of the hospital, things weren’t much better. He ripped out the sutres on his stomach once, soon afterwards, by sneezing too hard and too frequently, and went to the emergency room again, in an ambulance this time. Their frenzied discussion before the call was made had an almost comical quality to it, and it would be in my perverse nature to find morbid humor in something like that.

Perhaps it would have been easier if he hadn’t been quite so difficult. But the illness made him bitter and cruel and often intolerable.

“You think they’re joking?
You have to go provoke him
I guess it’s high time you found out”#

When death is hovering at their shoulders and breathing down their necks, some people change by becoming grateful towards life. And some people become dark and cynical and will never feel whole again. This was the case with my father. We lived in fear of his anger and tended to his often childishly selfish whims because he had suffered and therefore must be excused. There was anger in me as well, a white blind anger that knew no father, and that is, I suppose, around the time I began to undergo a great change. Perhaps not for the worse, but certainly towards the darker. I constantly strove to avoid him and often hated him for his harsh, ugly words, the acidity of which cannot be described, his extreme bitterness, and the generally foul temper that had become more his usual frame of mind than transitory mood. No one knows the words that have been exchanged in this household, nor how gloomy and fractured the atmosphere often was. I’d come home from school and be depressed to see him in his study, so sullen, pathetic, and limp in his chair, that eternal frown upon his bloated face. I know part of it was my fault. He was hurt by my silence and my coldness. My mother has always been more forgiving of him, but I am more like him in that I rarely forgive and never forget. They thought I didn’t care about any of it. And the truth is, I felt pity for him but more pity for myself.

And there’s a dream stuck in my brain that keeps coming back... In it, we are having a picnic, the three of us, the family that grew farther apart during crisis. And it’s all sunshine and smiles and green grass and summer, just as it always is in family photos. No one ever captures the sad moments or the scowl on someone’s face right before the smile and pose for the camera. They want us at our best. We want to flip through the old photo albums on those days when Sister Nostalgia comes visiting and remember ourselves as we appeared in those seconds, whether we really were that way or not. There’s an idea lodged in people’s minds that the past must always be brighter than the future. That there was perfection before the sudden schism or slow, subtle progression of cracks. And yet that no more tells the whole story than if I had just told you a tale of courage and hope and family union. We save what face we can, but I am only here to destroy it because I did so years ago.

Because in the dream we are happy together and the sky is like a bright blue bowl, curved and flawless, and the sunlight is not weak or gray. But suddenly I realize that I’m missing from this picture, that where I am is simply a person-shaped hole in the air; I’m not there but you can see a faint outline where I used to be or maybe should be but never was. My place is there, and filled. With pure, flawless blue and wisps of white cloud. I’m worried, but I’m not going to brood over the meaning of this dream too much, because I think I already know. And I think I’m going to pick up this slick little square of paper and toss it into the air with a flick of my wrist. Who knows? It might then attach itself to the sky and become real. I might just not care if it did, because the pain that still squeezes my heart is more real than that dream photograph.

And sometimes I remember something... I remember how sleep, whether pretended or genuine, is always my sanctuary. Also a time for listening intently and not being noticed listening. I remember how, when I was little, I would pretend to have fallen asleep in the car just so my parents would think I had and my mom would carry me up all those flights of stairs, and I’d love the feeling of being cradled against her chest, gently swaying to the rhythm of her steps. Just the knowledge that I had two strange people to care for me, to carry me up the stairs if I was a little pretender, was enough. And then I feel like rushing back into their arms and being whole and together again. I feel like running home as fast as I can, right back into the past and my childhood, but then I remember that I’m only walking to the house we live in now, the one with all the invisible walls and boundaries. Oh God, I think then. Yes, the pain in my heart is more real than a photo in a dream where I was missing.

“...she always thought of a pretty sound
That she heard as a girl in her mother’s bed
The sound of some breathing, another breath, in and out
When some lungs expand and contract like they do”~

So now I’m more careful than before, and stay within the walls we’ve built over the years, the rooms that separate us as effectively as oceans; and it wouldn’t be like me to be anything other than the impossibly silent, awkward one. And I have the idea that I’m still waiting in Room Number Thirty-Four, not knowing what I’m waiting for but aching to catch the future that will come anyway, whether it’s the one I wanted or not. Where I am is Room Number Thirty-Four; it’s not quite life and it’s not death, and I am waiting because there is absolutely nothing else in the world I can do. It might never have been my father that I was waiting for; maybe I went through that door into the room beyond and never came back.  


* From the song “Marigold” (written by K. Cobain)
# From the song “Half Jack” (written by A. Palmer)
~ From the song “Rusty the Skatemaker” (written by M. Creager)