TILL DEATH DO US PART | JENLISA

TWENTY

JENNIE

***

Tripping Through the Rifts

February 16th, 2017

(13 years left)

***

It’s raining and I watch the lines it makes along the plate glass window here at the top floor of Saint James Hospital. It’s thick enough to obscure the skyline in the distance. Somehow though, as if it is my very unfortunate gift, my eyes find the building where my practice once was. It is surreal seeing it, silver and gray in the gathering storm. Up until now, I’ve avoided looking at this part of the skyline because I didn’t think I could face it.

I measure the windows that were once my office, twenty-five stories up, and it fills me with a dread that I can’t fully comprehend. It’s a place where Lisa and I kissed countless times in the fold of stormy clouds and where I regarded a world from my complacent tower that I never imagined in a million years would change.

But it did, in the blink of an eye.

When I can’t look at the building anymore, I stare at the steps beside me, where my lunch tray sits at my feet uneaten. I can’t compel myself to find my appetite, not even for
strawberry Jell-O. I have a bad feeling about today, and that bad feeling is something I can’t seem to shake. It’s also what has brought me here to linger in the things I seem to forget when I’m assuaged by all the wonderful in my life.

It doesn’t help that today I’m especially sensitive to everything I remember about this place, both Saint James and New York City. My eyes find my old building again and I palm the glass, an outline growing where the heat of my skin finds the cold pane.

I must have really bad PMS, because it’s almost beyond me to cope with today. I step back from the window, leaving my handprint as a reminder of my passing and fall to a seated position on the empty stairs beside me. Behind me, the corridor is cordoned off due to endless budgetary restraints that keep the new wing of Saint James from being completed. It leaves me alone aside from the occasional wandering person in the tier below me, and thank God for it, because I’m tired enough to feel weak today.

The edge of the concrete cuts into my thigh and I palm my face in my hands. I remember standing on these very stairs, talking to Ryan after Lisa died. It was where I asked him to prescribe me the medication I needed to end my life. It was raining like this too, but instead of construction tape, there had been residents moving around, surgeons, nurses buzzing to and from the new wing of the hospital.

I watch it rain as a world I once understood feels alien around me. People pass me, and then move on. Frozen in this purgatory the world keeps turning even though I am rooted in place.

“Jennie?” Ryan’s voice sounds absolutely shocked as he does a double take at the peripheral of my vision.

I don’t want him to see me, but I need him to at the same time.

“What are you doing here, baby?” Now he sounds worried, and that word, that term of endearment on his lips is hard to hear. He puts a hand on my arm, pulling me into a hug. His arms are warm and solid and make me feel so small in comparison to when I was able to hug Lisa. My throat tightens at the thought, and I lift my head from his shoulder as I realize again that she’s gone. I don’t know when I’ll ever remember to forget it.

I pull away from Ryan’s embrace.

“Hey, hey, talk to me.”

I shake my head, because I can’t. If I surrender to the emotion I feel, I will be swallowed whole. I might just lay down right here and died. That’s what it feels like anyway.