Pencil Drawing – In the Hospital
This is… 4 or 5 years old? I went through my sketchbook the other day and I figured I’d post some of the drawings I was more proud of. It’s not often I finish a drawing, haha.
Sarah
One year checkup
I HAVE BEEN OFFICIALLY BLOGGING FOR ONE YEAR. Bloggiversary? Am I allowed to say that word? It feels like a gross portmanteau… like synergy, or mayochup, or chillax, or meatplosion.
What a crazy year. I’ve learned so much. Even in the past week, I’ve learned so much. Can I even begin to quantify the learning I’ve learned in a year?
Ah, no, I can’t. Unfortunately I can’t remember what I learned. But I know it’s a lot.
Here’s some of what I’ve learned in just the past week:
- Listen to the red flags in every situation. Don’t do stupid things out of laziness. Cut carefully with knives. Use the pusher with the food processor. Do NOT do stupid things.
- Get your chronic cough checked out and fixed. You might get pneumonia and die.
- Don’t be a sedentary office worker; move. Or you might get pneumonia and die.
- Diet brain is a fucking menace. Eat your fats and proteins along with vegetables. I don’t know, you’ll figure it out. Do not ignore diet brain. You’ll end up chopping off digits.
- One cat will always be fat. What weight one loses, the other finds. This is an unassailable fact of life.
- Fingers heal like Wolverine. They refill and replace tissue with minimal scarring.
- Argue with your sister a little more when you don’t want something to happen. You can be just as stubborn as she is. Do it. Your fingers are your own and being tractable is not worth getting gauze stuck in the wound for days.
- People get gauze stuck in their wounds on purpose, then rip it out along with healing new tissue all the time. This called debriding the wound. I don’t understand why nice doctors would make people do this.
- David Tennant’s peculiar brand of crazy and rubber face feels like home. Watch more of his stuff. Something has got to fill the Doctor Who void…
- Dostoyevsky still blows your mind. Write like him. Except, with more lovable characters. …It could happen.
- You have too many sketchbooks. And only six good drawings?
- Breathe, relax. If you stress out about things like gauze in your wound, you’ll give yourself a hive.
So… thanks for a year of blogging. You’re all nuts. I love you so much.
I knew a man
I knew a man,
though not very well.
A nice man
now dead
from pneumonia.
We were all looking sideways at S——
with her regrowing cancer hair
but death came at us
from an unexpected direction.
I wasn’t even aware he was sick
until Friday.
On Saturday
I cut off the tip of my finger.
It’s not often I am afraid
but I was
truly
afraid.
I pressed my finger into my palm to stem the bleeding.
It felt deformed. Too short, too flat.
I didn’t want to know what it looked like.
A reminder of my mortality
too close
too close.
On Monday
we get the office email.
He has died. We grieve his passing.
The office is quiet
with heavy atmosphere.
Somebody has set
a vase of flowers
outside his office door.
They have been placed there
very gently
by honoring hands,
sad hands.
We need
to honor the dead.
We decorate their haunts.
We create ceremonies.
We save mementos.
We tell stories.
I only knew this man by sight.
Another office worker
someone who helped grease the cogs
of our mutual machine.
We might wave or nod.
He had a habit
of muttering to himself
funny, quirky things.
I would pick up snatches of his internal dialog
when I walked by.
How well did he know me?
My finger is stiff with scab.
I worry at it, clean it, unwrap it, rewrap it.
It will have to last me
a few years longer.
The river
The river
Runs rolls rumbles tumbles tosses
Yesterday it was just a creek
The rains have swelled it
This is why
The banks are so broad
The usual pebbly islands sunk
Redrawn rewritten redrafted
Underneath the water
Unseen
Beneath the roiling muck
The river rewrites itself
With every passing rain cloud
It changes who it is
It carries garbage further away
It carries new garbage in
It fills new puddles
To fill with new frogs
And new adventures
Because it chose
To flow where the water wants.
It allows life
To alter its bones.
It doesn’t resist.
It relaxes into chaos,
Falls in, falls out.
It dries to emptiness,
Floods to new paths.
It bends.
That is why
The river is forever.
Gone for Five Minutes
Sitting at my desk, trying to focus at work.
Put this in that folder there,
Type that data here,
Fill out all the little boxes…
What was that.
a ghost wind passes through me.
I continue to type
I continue to read
but something inside has been
toppled
and everything’s going gray.
oh god.
what is coming.
my stomach lurches.
please tell me this won’t last.
the world around me has lost all color.
Death has awoken
and rests his bony fingers
on my shoulder.
life is meaningless.
the world has stopped turning.
i’m back in that place again.
this cold, lonely cell
and i can’t remember how to cry.
five minutes pass… not long.
just as inexplicably
Death changes his mind.
wraps himself in his cloak
and curls back into a benign black ball in the corner of my mind.
as he retires, ambient warmth returns.
The world sets back into motion.
Color resurges into my reality.
I’m in my office again
Still typing away
Coworkers unaware
That for five minutes
I was briefly pushed
Out of their world.
Thank god
It didn’t last.
It didn’t last.
Sarah D. Silvey 