The Horror

I am crumbling.  This seems too much to do alone.  I'm falling. . . falling.  

5:00 a.m.  I had been having trouble sleeping and had gotten up to pee not because I needed to but because I needed to get out of bed for the moment.  I was sitting on the side of the bed when the phone rang.  There is only one number that will ring through on my phone after ten o'clock.  It was my mother.  

"Where are you?!"

"I'm at your house."

"Where am I?"

"You are in the hospital."

She said people had come into her room asking her if she had an attorney.  She rambled on not really coherent.  They asked her, she said, about her cardiologist.  More rambling.  

I was beginning to piece things together.  She had been complaining that she felt like she was getting congestion in her chest.  While I was there last night, a tech came in and gave her an EKG.  Later that night, I had a message on my phone from someone in the E.R. asking me to call back.  They wanted to give me the results of some tests.  I called the number I was given, but once again, it went straight to a recorded message saying that the office wouldn't be open until Monday morning.  

I will go to the hospital in a bit.  It has been a real shit show so far, and now I am haunted by my mother's plea.  

"Don't let me get lost in my mind or my body."  

There is nothing I can do but suffer with her.  I feel as if I've had a stroke.  My body isn't working right.  My mind is slow.  Everything in my life is breaking down and I no longer have the energy to keep up.  

Maybe it is the February moon.  I have always thought it to be my friend, but such thoughts are silly.  It is just another one way alley.  

I sit in a dark and empty house on a stupidly cold winter's night, the full moon still hanging low in the western sky.  I feel the enormity of all things beyond me, the uselessness of endeavor.