The Things We Called Friends

Hi.

Thought I come up for air, ya know? Before I rejoin the rat pack again.

Busy is not really the word why I don't write anymore. Spent and only in a way that Philip K Dick knows how. Dick once describe exhaustion in scientific metaphors akin to a man after ejaculation. Of how physics deem that heat can only be transfer and never destroyed? Transference through ejaculation spends a man truly; where there is no more heat or light left in the body. Not broken, but spent.

I help run our hospital nursing newsletter. Facilitate is the right word. Chasing datelines and nagging strangers. Then it was the new house. When I had moved in during the renovation, I had literally build it from scraps. The landscape changes from time to time. One period I was living in sawdust, exposed electrical wiring and unfamiliar shadows, next I was living underneath newspapers and TV boxes. I slept and breathe in a room fresh of paint and lacquer, I have not stopped coughing since. Now I scrub for a living.

Spent. Financially and mentally.

At least I've got my own home. I should count on that.

Yesterday I went to Harry's again. I didn't get the bar seat because of the small crowd enjoying the basketball match under the telly, instead I got myself a seat at a corner. It has become a deliberate ritual now whenever there is a wronged death. Wronged in the way that it could be prevented, wronged in the way that guilt keep telling you that it is. That it might be on your hands too. Gone are the days when I thought that if my patient is fine when I have hand over to the incoming shift then anything that should incur next should not have anything to do with me.

Gone. Now anything and everything has to do with me. That's what my king size guilt tells me. Everything. Global warming, third world children dying, AIDS, the hole in the sky, the stubborn stain on my kitchen floor. Anything. Whether I'm there or not. People don't just die like that. They don't just look pretty for your shift and then die on someone else in the next minute. But they do, all the fucking time. They shouldn't. But they do. People don't die just like that. Even a cardiac arrest have a freaking process to follow. There must be something I didn't do. It could be anything. I didn't observe him closely, I didn't address his distress properly. Anything and everything.

I'm so incompetent that I could only mourn for him with a glass of promotional cocktail.

Spent. Emotionally.

I should at least be glad that I have realize that myself and not from somebody's else. Guilt is my own mother.