De-valescence
It’s so cold in here today my nipples hurt. I say that not to be suggestive or funny; it’s true. There’s something wrong with that. I work in a fucking hospital where people are supposed to be convalescing. How can people convalesce when the air is 40 degrees cold? I mean, my fingers are shaking and some are numb. Everything in my office is cold to touch. I don’t want to pick up my phone.
Somehow I made it 23 years before I learned the word "convalesce," and I learned it from my friend Matt. I was staying in the apartment, where he and others were living in Chicago for the weekend. I was sitting in a side room with Gregg, when Matt decided to join us. This might be the same night Matt was dressed all in long john white, having been working outdoors in the cold. Kyle too was dressed in all whitish. I’d been observing this all night, a rare and odd sight, as far as I was concerned. Finally Matt said, "Kyle and I are snowmen!" Anyway, Matt went to get an ashtray and came flying back, literally. He was talking as he approached the room, running down the hardwood hallway, when his socked feet, both at the same time, swept up from under him. Suddenly he was horizontal, three or four feet in the air, ashtray and ashes down and scattered. I had never seen anybody in that position--that high off the floor--before then. The next week, he wrote in an e-mail to me that he was convalescing just fine.
Some of my fingertips are purple, and I might be devalescing in the snow piling up around my desk. This is the most lucid thought in my head right now.
Somehow I made it 23 years before I learned the word "convalesce," and I learned it from my friend Matt. I was staying in the apartment, where he and others were living in Chicago for the weekend. I was sitting in a side room with Gregg, when Matt decided to join us. This might be the same night Matt was dressed all in long john white, having been working outdoors in the cold. Kyle too was dressed in all whitish. I’d been observing this all night, a rare and odd sight, as far as I was concerned. Finally Matt said, "Kyle and I are snowmen!" Anyway, Matt went to get an ashtray and came flying back, literally. He was talking as he approached the room, running down the hardwood hallway, when his socked feet, both at the same time, swept up from under him. Suddenly he was horizontal, three or four feet in the air, ashtray and ashes down and scattered. I had never seen anybody in that position--that high off the floor--before then. The next week, he wrote in an e-mail to me that he was convalescing just fine.
Some of my fingertips are purple, and I might be devalescing in the snow piling up around my desk. This is the most lucid thought in my head right now.
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