Virginal snow kisses collectively culled from the burgundy coastline of all time...

 

 

Post script

I am wheeled out of the hospital five days later in a wheel chair because it is protocol. There is a certain stillness when I enter wooden frame of the only house I have ever known, as I walk past the piano, past the picture of the wilted flowers hanging like a centerpiece that my grandfather painted a few months before he died, past the French doors, up the stairs, to the bedroom overlooking the corner of cedar and Sherman, he Sweet Gum tree, my copy of Kerouac's on The Road and the notebooks where I have be scribing my poems tucked under my arms, flailing limp as I fall descend on the cusp of me bed in splayed limbed Christ-like fashion.


It feels like eves solitary organ income in my anatomy has been aired out like spring linen. Light dries through my bedroom window in  a coppery spring haze. As if breaking into prayer over a thankgiving dinner I assay my heap of notebooks. In five days I will be leaving Manual forever and somehow I managed to jip the last week of the school I deplored remaining face-up in a hospital bed where I was spoon fed with tubes with a beautiful blonde girl lassoed in the crooked right-angles of my arms.

Sometime later on that night I will realize that the four days I spent in the hospital constitutes the longest duration I have gone sans a cup of coffee since kissing Renae Holiday’s minty lips freshman year. I look at the stapled dossier I was handed upon exiting stating what I am and am not to eat. The diagnoses is still acute pancreatitis followed by professionals who make six-figures a year  prodding and vivisecting the human anatomy doffing their glasses while scratching the top of their heads.

I look at the picture of the little kid bartering a rose that Megan sent me. I look at her handwriting that looks like bubbles fizzling from a non-caffeine carbonated beverage.  Next to my poetry notebook there is a copy of the Journal Star want ads. There is a see-through crimson balloon and the words BARNES ampersand NOBLES and how they will be conducting interviews for the incumbent opening of their Big Hollow store this coming Monday.

I look at Megan's card. It is scribbled in blue ink. It is written in glitter and smiles and pulses and laughter and love. 

The phone in my bedroom reverberates in a purr. I am still thinking about Megan, talking to her on the phone in my bedroom that I  accumulate 100 dollar phone bills talking to her, losing myself in the hyacinth hiccup of her voice, role-playing pretending we are in paris, pretending we are holding hands, pretending that we just can’t stop licking the buffet of the others flesh, laughing, turning the lights off, telling the other  to look at the lunar cue ball of the moon and wish at the same time.

 My sister's alto carols up the stairs informing me that the call is for me. 

It is Jackie.

“Just wanted to call and make sure that you were okay. You know, we were all worried about you.”

 I ask who.

“The Lums Bums.” Jackie says that the waitresses claim that they saved so much coffee the week I was in the hospital that Columbia is calling asking what happened?”

 I smile still holding Megan's card as if it is a wounded gerbil.

"I just wanted to call and inquire if you are still coming?"

I reply to Jackie's voice by saying the word coming stapled in query formation.

"Yeah. The bonfire at my place tomorrow night. I just wanted to know if your were still coming?"

I try to tell her that I have been in the hospital the entire week. Jackie tells me that she already bought the special kind of potato chips that are healthy so I have to come.

"Besides, Nikki really wants to see you."

I say Nikki's name again, followed by a more audible question mark.

"Yeah, I think she likes you." Jackie notes before asking if she can pick me up at 6pm.

"Six is fine." I tell her, knowing that Kitty will be at Sunday mass with her family.

Jackie offers out an  okay then, telling me she will be by at six, conveying to me she is glad I am feeling better, telling me to smile.