To The Version Of My Mother Which Lives In The Hospital  •  Creative Nonfiction  •  May 2023 

I’m often afraid you’re going to come for her again. I have dreams about it – you, zombie-like, shivering, pale, visible-ribbed, crawling out of the hospital on your hands and knees in the middle of the night, sinking your overgrown nails into her shoulders, ripping her out of her bed, and dragging her all the way back there with you to the glowing emergency room lights. I imagine waking up too many miles away with a hundred missed calls telling me she’s gone – she’s unreachable – she’s somewhere so far from herself that we can’t bring her back – but I never do. The dreams just keep coming, painful and pointless.

I still see you in certain casts of light, certain angles in her face when she turns her head – she’s so thin now that she has to wear a blanket around the house and set the heat to 80, day and night. She looks to me to ask a question and the sharp edge of her cheekbone suddenly aligns her face more with yours than with the one I recognize – but then she meets my eyes and I think, no, it’s her, she’s back. Sometimes I hear you when she stands too suddenly and cries out in pain. She grunts and wails from several rooms away and the sound shudders through the house like a spirit. Then someone helps her stand up straight and, as suddenly as you returned, you’re gone again.

I only saw you once. On the train to see you, I was filled with a demanding, insatiable pain. It felt animalistic and hungry, the moon casting its unceasing glare on it from the other side of the dusty window, lighting the feeling up neon red inside me. On impulse, I paid too much for a burger from the dining car – though I hadn’t eaten meat in months – and devoured it with the reckless abandon of a wild animal tearing into a fresh kill, nothing but fury and blood and teeth. When I arrived at my parents’ house – empty and dark, an abandoned ship – that night, I dropped my bags and my body onto the floor of the kitchen and wailed. The sounds were so full of pure pain that I could barely recognize them as coming from me. I fell asleep there, on the kitchen floor, and was woken in the morning by the sound of yard work being done next door.

You didn’t speak much. At times, it seemed like you’d forgotten how. You’d begin a sentence – offering a few scattered words – and then trail off, opening and closing your mouth like a beached fish. In those moments, you’d stare at me, your pupils huge and screaming, begging to form words of their own – but they couldn’t, didn’t, and you’d just keep staring, your chest rising and falling in heavy dry breaths, keeping rhythm with the beeping of the heart rate monitor. Sometimes it was scarier when you did speak. You asked me how my flight there was (I hadn’t lived outside of the state since I was 18. I took a train). You asked me if I’d spoken to Aunt Dorothy lately (she’d died two months prior). You asked me where we were going (nowhere). You asked what was going on (nothing and everything).

I only stayed for two days. I felt guilty when I wasn’t there and guiltier when I was. I had to get back to my classes, mostly, but even more than that I didn’t know how to talk to you, or how to take care of you. I sat by your bedside and said very little. When you underwent procedures that required everyone to leave the room, I walked to the cemetery across the street and laid in the grass among the headstones. I wondered who I might be forced to become in the aftermath of you. I wondered if you might be the last version of her that I might see. I wondered how many versions of me she might never meet.

When my mom finally went home, my aunt and my stepdad helped each other brush out all the mats in her hair that you made when you were lying in that hospital bed. The last time I went to see her, she showed me the same before photo of it three separate times – her back is turned to the camera, her body stiff against the milk-yellow sky outside the window, her hair centered in the frame, so matted and infinite it looks like the face of some Lovecraftian monstrosity, each tangle of hair a mess of a thousand eyes,  tendrils sticking out in all directions. How it must have felt to her to be changed by someone she’d never met. How it must have felt to you to be taken away by lack of memory, by slow healing, by brushes and detangling spray.

When I talk to my mom now, she doesn’t remember you. She only knows you through stories from other people – jokes about things you said when they pumped you full of drugs; discussions about the timelines of when you got bad and then good and then bad again; photos of you lying there, slack-jawed, dull-skinned, empty-eyed. She doesn’t remember the me that existed in the hospital during that time, either. She knows I was there because my stepdad told her, but she doesn’t remember me. I wonder, though, if you remember. All that time, lying blank-faced in bed – where did your consciousness go? How much of it stuck to the world around it, and how much of it disappeared to some other place? I could barely look at you, but when I did, I felt as though your eyes saw into me and through me at the same time, like staring into a pool. Do you remember me? Do you still exist somewhere – in that room? In the sickness in my mother’s body? In her soul? In mine?