There was a week, once, where I slept near a big glowing cross, and the light shone sideways through thick panes patterned with a wiry crosshatch. The sheets smelled like sickness and clean, and at night you could see the Domino Sugar sign–big for a billion miles away.

I couldn’t get out of bed for days–the pain was like God finally becoming physically manifest. Small and frail like never before.

On the third day, they said that if I didn’t pee they would give me a catheter and so I peed. I remember them laughing at my panic. I felt like I would explode. The tears met mucus on the way out, and someone–my father?–held me up while I did it. It could’ve been anyone. I was more scared of a catheter than any disease.

I dozed in and out all day–a hot, sweaty, opiate drift; how lovely and unfortunate.

Beautiful chills and sickening swing.

Excruciating pain and a calm that you could feel climb in, coldly.

On the fourth day, a black man was elected as the next president.

As far as my brother and I were concerned I was as good as dead. “Endocarditis: an infection of the heart” they postulated. I heard my brother moan like a dying dog through the phone when my mother informed him. The language collapsed out of her, and her voice broke in a way that will forever reverberate in my head and always bring small waves of nausea to shore.

That night I dreamt that I was on a plane:

I was standing in the middle aisle. Somehow, I could see right through the cockpit window: it was beautiful. And through the clouds, an unsuspecting mountain peak. And an old man had just told me a story about apples. It felt like a field trip but way more wonderful. Time slipped when we made impact, and I watched the front and the sides of the plane collapse in so slowly that by the time they reached me I could feel each part of me crumble and snap and go up in flames. Everything went white–not pretty, or serene, or warm–just a big nothing with no self. Moderately cold, as I recall.

I awoke to the Domino Sugar sign, the cord from an earphone stuck pressed into my face. I skipped forward to the song I always did and pretended–performer and audience–that it wasn’t a premonition. The skepticism was scared out so I pressed the button for the pain serum and went back to sleep.

On the sixth day, they took out the tubes, but they put in a new one. A real weird one.

For weeks after I was released, I wore(?) a “PICC line” in my arm.

It was absolutely sickening. Tiny movements only or my stomach flips. Congealed red under the sticky laminate when I moved it wrong. Or even when I didn’t. New rules.

Twice a day I would attach fat saline and heparin syringes to the line and push the clear, cold fluids up and in. I could feel my body resist. I could feel myself having to convince my body I wasn’t breaking any of the new rules. After flushing the line, I would attach a small, soft orb, about the size of fat lime, with a pale olive antibiotic stew inside that made me feel like I was stuck in science fiction. After about an hour and a half the bulb would have gone slack and flat and I would flush the line again and clamp it shut. Sometimes I would pull–just a little–on the syringe instead of pushing, just to get that pure wave of sick and revolt.

My body was newly contiguous with what it wasn’t. Weeks of this: Refrigerated orbs, hundred-count boxes of pre-filled syringes, stacked cardboard caches of latex gloves, two thousand alcohol pads or more. All stashed in the appropriate conspicuousness of a dank basement. It was kind of great.

I wore a blue half-sleeve, slick with sapphire shine, to school to cover the line when I was deemed able to return. It it served me well to–however clumsily–conceal the open wound; the truly weird tubes and clamps and orbs. Medicine is mad weird.

I missed the hospital for years after–I kind of still do. There was something about fear and sickness that made me objectively good for a moment. For a whole chain of consecutive moments. The whole range of Edible Arrangements. There was something about the seeming loss of control that shrouded me in a veil of nobility. A brand new crispness to each action, to each decision, each new bit of information. An eroticism to waking up just before dawn to an ellipse of puzzled white coats.

There was some intimacy there, in the hospital, I hadn’t ever encountered before, and haven’t since.

The first time they let you drink water after days of lip-splitting thirst: good God.