That Boy [bxb] - sequel to P.B.

Day three

If I was a love poet,
I'd write about how you have the audacity
to be beautiful
even when everything around you is ugly.
I'd write about your eyelashes
and how they are like violin strings that play symphonies
every time you blink.

If I was a love poet,
I'd write about how I melt in front of you like an ice sculpture
every time I hear your voice
or whenever I see your name on the caller ID.
My heart,
it plays hopscotch inside my chest
and climbs on my ribs like monkey bars
and I feel like a child
all over again.
— Rudy Francisco.

Day three

Saturday into Sunday

I hate the visiting hours.

Eight a.m. to six p.m.

Ten hours of being at his bedside, holding his hand, stroking at his skin, talking to him, singing, the agony of having to see him hooked up to so many wires and machines, unable to do anything but sit there, and then I have to go. That's another fourteen hours at home, not knowing, and it kills me.

The one thing that does help me feel better is that during those ten hours Matty is not alone. I have to keep reminding myself that he has his mother by his side, someone who is now to be spending every night with him in the ICU on a camping cot set up next to him. Every night so he's not on his own.

I feel grateful that this was allowed, albeit under exceptional circumstances of him posing as a high risk of fatality and the fact that Tina works at that hospital. In any case where Matty's condition deteriorates or he passes, she will already be there. It's much more convenient.

Despite how badly I want to, I'm not allowed to stay.

Nonetheless, I try to keep a positive mind. Prepare for the worse, expect the best, Sofia told me.

I have no idea if he knows he's in a coma, but the nurse said to me that he can hear what people are saying. If he can do that, then he must able to hear doctors and nurses muttering about medical things and brain injuries and catheters and heart rate and this and that. He must know if he can hear. Knowing Matty, if he does know, he would be terrified. The thought increases my apprehension.

After I'm made to go home when six p.m. comes around, I spend the next hour of my time researching. I type in 'are people aware that they're in a coma?' and hope that they're not.

"Please don't be aware," I mutter out loud as I click onto a website, and so I read it, and then I read another, and another.

I read stories of people who remember being in a coma, the dreams and hallucinations they had, so vividly, but it doesn't say that they knew they were in a coma. That must be that people don't know. Matthew doesn't know. This relieves me a little.

He's not scared.

At dinner, us all being sat in silence is a foreign occurrence. Usually, the table is lively with chatter, the room filling with the voices of seven people and the babbles of a seven month old baby. It's not like that today. The only sound that can be heard is the scraping back of chairs, the clinging of cutlery, and the sighs coming from people who are so tired. So heartbroken. Longing for their brother and son to be able to sit here and enjoy dinner with them.