If only there was a way to skip through all this stuff and get to that place.
❖
When I see Tshiamo there, I’m going to slap him first before I kiss and hug him. Slap him first for all the heartache he’s caused us by being so selfish and unkind. Slap him first for being a coward, for running away, for not thinking about us first, for only seeing himself and his own pain. But then I’ll hug him and kiss him, because I miss him even now. I still miss him like it was only yesterday that he chose to leave us. I miss him even though I hate him for what he did.
❖
Tshiamo never liked me to touch him much. He never let me hold his hand, never even just let me rest my head against his shoulder. It didn’t matter that I was really tired and my neck was sore. He said he didn’t like it, it made him hot.
It hurt my feelings. It felt like he didn’t love me. I wanted him to hold me, even just my hand. Sometimes, late at night, as we sat on the couch watching Friday night TV, I’d pretend to forget, to be fast asleep and not know what I was doing. But he’d still shrug my head off and inch away from me. I suppose he knew. He knew what he, what men, are capable of.
I used to think it might be because I smelled of blood, of off blood, like fish. I couldn’t wait for Ma to let me use tampons so I wouldn’t stink so bad. I thought maybe that was why Tshiamo didn’t want me too near him.
❖
This morning I worked up the nerve to call the lab and ask for my results. The lady on the phone took a long time to find my name on the system. I had to spell it for her twice, and then give her my patient folder number. When she said, “Everything’s fine,” I didn’t understand what her words meant initially.
“Everything’s fine?” I asked, a little annoyed at the liberal use of the word “everything.”
She said it again. “Everything’s fine. Everything’s normal. Sero-negative, as in, no HIV, sisi.”
She was in a hurry. I was probably the umpteenth anxious clinician who’d called that day and she probably thought I was just another needlestick injury. But still. There was no need to be rude.
“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Everything’s fine. You’re negative. There’s been no seroconversion.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“But be more careful next time. We’ve had one or two come back positive this year. You doctors need to be more cautious.”
Then she dropped the phone.
❖
Eight weeks to the day, today. Eight weeks to the day.
❖
I have no fight left in me. I’ve surrendered completely to the physics and the chemistry and the molecules of unanswered prayers that float above and past my head. I want nothing, and have accepted that nothing wants me. I am neither waiting, nor hoping. Neither disbelieving nor anticipating. I just am.
❖
The mornings are quiet here at home, nothing like at the hospital. There’s no singing here. Ma wilted when Tshiamo died, like spinach in a little bit of heat. She moves without a sound, appears out of nowhere, sits for hours alone in the dark. There’s no morning prayer in this place, no great amen. The house smells of nothing. No industrial bleach to purge the floors, no washbasins bubbling with scented soaps sent as gifts by visiting family, no bells to chase them home. There’s nothing here.
❖
I miss it.
❖
I didn’t think that I’d ever feel like this. That I’d actually miss it. The hospital, that is. Perhaps it’s being so palpably useful that I miss, even if it’s in the most useless ways. Perhaps it’s touching people that I miss. Feeling pulses ten, twelve, twenty times a day. Thready pulses, bounding pulses, hammering pulses, fading pulses morning, noon, and night. Perhaps it’s the smells: birth, death, soap, stool, coffee, alcohol, over and over again. It’s the most real thing I know. The only real thing I know.
❖
We’ve been pretty broke these past few weeks—haven’t paid the lights. I googled how long it takes before they switch them off, because data is something I still have. I feel guilty asking You for help, Lord, because I have a job, I can earn money. I’m just too scared to go back.
After five days of bereavement leave, I got an email warning that any additional time at home would be unpaid. Then, a few weeks later, a lady from Human Resources called to ask where I was.
“Does she know she has to finish her internship within three years of graduating? She’ll have to rewrite her final year exams if she doesn’t come back to work.”
I heard Ma shouting at her over the phone. “What kind of person are you? Do you have any idea what she’s been through?” Ma insisted that I’d return when I was ready. She said we didn’t care if they stopped my salary.
Of course we cared.
❖
I had thought all the problems were out there: the hospital, the nurses, the CEO, the clerks, the lab, the blood bank, the porters, the security guards, the dietician, the physiotherapist, the OT, the specialists, the lazy registrars, the cats, the cleaners, the mice, the community, the MEC, the minister, the government, the president, the country, the world. I thought if I could just hide here, I’d
