The sparkle

I’ve never liked goodbyes, probably because I’m not really good at them. I never know what to say, I make them awkward, I linger too much selfishly trying to buy time, to print every second into my cortex, hoping that it will be saved somewhere, into a void of foreverness. 

There’s always a fear of not having done enough, a bit like the feeling you get when you leave your house, as if you’ve forgotten something. A scar. A shade of red on your knee. An itchy patch on your forearm. A bruise on your toe. 

You’ve marked your corner of our ward as yours and without it the ward becomes just 51, like a puzzle piece of a perfection that we’ll have to learn to live without. 

In antithesis, I want to rush you out, a delayed departure towards happiness and peacefulness that, no matter how much the sunset that you could see outside your window could try to offer you, you’d never get. 

The watercolour, the stickiness of the drugs on the fluid charts – fingerprints of time that we should’ve saved outside of the dusty hospital records. Because you weren’t just that to us and it feels like an impertinence to align you there. A bit like a sticker chart thrown in the bin once you’ve completed it – you earned it!

My swallow is painful and I despise it, because I thought peacefulness would feel better. It might be guilt, the guilt of the distance that this job gives us, the pain that it makes us give, when all we want is for you to be the one doing the 4-step dance. Not me trying to bribe you into giving in and winning your trust, only for me to break it again when I leave with my tray. While your life carries on on tunes of beeps, alarms, pump sounds, taps that don’t close properly, chit-chatters, phone rings, and cartoons watched on screens. 

I wonder how you measure time sometimes. Do you watch the sun rays melting the day into night on the hospital walls? Or by when the nurses change your bag of fluids, your TPN, or your feed? Can you hear the ticking of the clock? Or do you get used to it? 

I’ve started babbling about time again, the poetic version of “weather talk”. 

My mind wanders on my map of memories while I write your discharge summary on every bruise that is now healing – I don’t think I’ve told you how every step back digs into me and how we root for you like any family would. 

I’m a bit too sentimental, because I’ll miss your head on my shoulder, your tiny foot in my squeezing hand, the phone call from the nurses when they were worried about you.

However, I’ll keep your image as a brush on my Cezanne-sque picture of my life, a Shaguyan lamp that we have to release today into the big unknown outside our four noisy hospital walls.  

And if you ever want to remember anything – remember that you were really brave, even if you cried, even if you fought us; and if us, or mummy and daddy have ever or will cry, it’s because your sparkle is too bright. 

And that’s wonderful.