Pentimenti

It’s strange.

It’s weird to think that about eight years ago, I was whisked away into a kind of life I never ever thought would be my fate.

It’s odd to remember how I couldn’t sleep the night you were taken away on a stretcher while me and Dad and Ryan all followed you in our new car, the same SUV I’m driving now.

It’s peculiar to imagine myself in the shoes I wore back then, even though I don’t even think I was wearing shoes when we sat in the waiting room of the Orange Park Medical Center, thumbing through Shonen Jump magazine at the gloriously detailed manga comics I drew so much inspiration from.

Every time I think about it, it just all seems so foreign to me. Like I don’t even fully remember it happening. Maybe I blocked certain parts of it out of my brain from knowing that it had caused so much pain, or maybe I was simply just too young to remember the specifics. I don’t remember exactly how long it took to drive to and from downtown Jacksonville almost every day when you were transferred to St. Vincent’s. The particular family members who came to stay with us as you were in and out of progress are a bit blurry to me now.

One thing I think I’ll always hold on to is the way that so many things seemed to happen at night. The city lights would smear in my moving vision when I stared out the window to try and distract myself. I don’t recall if I was crying or not when we drove there, but I definitely remember bawling when you were taken away and I was so scared of what was to come. At that point I think I was just tired. Dad told me and Ryan that we’d be missing school the next day because we had to stay out so late. That didn’t matter to me.

What mattered was that you were stable at the moment and we didn’t find out what was going on for a good long time. The whole stretch of that month is a weird period for me to imagine and look back on simply for the reason that I just don’t really remember my emotions at the time. I’m sure I was heartbroken. I’m sure I was terrified. But one thing I think I felt as well was…just…oblivious.

I was such a painfully normal girl living a painfully normal life that I never would have imagined disaster to strike me of all people. At first I thought that it was the end for you. You’d die the first night staying over at the hospital and that was that, and that terrified me. But you stayed strong for a long time, and it lulled me into a sense of security. This would all be over, I told myself. You even got transferred to St. Vincent’s in downtown Jacksonville and I even had hope.

I remember that part pretty well. How I would draw in composition books on the long drive there with Grandma Taylor sitting in the backseat with me and Ryan, how the sun would set as we drove further and further away from our humble little Middleburg. Night hadn’t completely fallen from what I remember, a little bit of brightness still left in the sky when we ventured there after school almost every day. Or maybe it was just overcast? I don’t think I liked the drive there much. I probably would’ve stuck it in my brain even more if I enjoyed it.

And I remember how we had to park in a garage to visit you in St. Vincent’s. I remember the big bustling city I hardly ever got to visit and in a strange way, it was inspiring to see all those lights and life amongst the muted aura that shook me when we walked into that huge hospital. One day Dad had taken me there on a Sunday to visit you, and I brought along a Calvin and Hobbes book to read while he talked to you and I tried to force good thoughts into my head. The sun was shining that day and it was peaceful for once. Football was on the TV. We parked on a side-street and not in the parking garage.

But when we visited at night, everything just seemed dull and deaf and lackluster inside the hospital. We walked through the entrance where the closed gift shop was, full of teddy bears and flowers and chocolate, and the ceiling seemed miles high to my little vertically-challenged self. Night peered through the vacant windows and there was city as far as the eye could see. We’d ride the elevator up to your room and I don’t know if it was just my ten-year-old self being small, but your room always just seemed so big to me.

I’d sit in the corner and draw shoes into my makeshift sketchbook. I’d overhear you and Dad and Grandma and Grandpa and Ryan talk about how you had surgery and I tried to tune it out. Surgery meant serious, serious meant sad, sad meant death, and death meant…well, I don’t want to go there. I never wanted to, but I guess I was forced to eventually.

I remember looking out your window, and the image still sticks to me. I think it was the roof of a parking garage that sat outside. Maybe it was the one we parked in; I don’t remember. The moon lit the white walls of it and made it shine. There was water in the distance, too. Probably the St. Johns River. I guess one reason why I can still remember it, and one reason why I’m getting so compelled to write about it, is the fact that when I look out the window of my college dorm, I get a perfect view of the UCF water tower and a new parking garage they’re building a little bit away. The only thing is that even though the water tower is white, it doesn’t shine like the parking garage outside your window did.

And I’d sit there in your huge hospital room for hours on end while our family talked about subjects I ignored or was too young to understand, and every night I’d kiss you and we’d say goodnight and I’d sleep in our Explorer on the long drive home to start the cycle over again.

And it didn’t matter to me that you had to wear an oxygen tank or be accompanied by a loud box that kinda looked like a copy machine and gave you air when you were let out of St. Vincent’s, because to me it meant progress. Progress meant better, better meant normal, normal meant all smiles once again, and all smiles meant that I would never touch the tears I always feared I’d have to.

Because you were home. You were here with me, Dad, Ryan and Grandma Taylor (who would look after me and Ryan on those nights where Dad would visit you at the hospital and leave us behind). You could kiss me goodnight without us having to drive an hour afterwards, and even if you couldn’t move a lot, just seeing you made my day.

It didn’t last very long, though, because one day apparently Dad came home and saw you sleeping but you weren’t breathing, and the ambulances came again to take you away. You were back in Orange Park Medical, in the Intensive Care Unit this time, with all the glass windows giving a false sense of openness to the sick souls forced to waste away in such a hopeless place. It makes me sick to think about it. Hospitals in general make me feel ill. Everything smells like latex and sterility, and everything feels like it’s too clean, too perfect, and yet just behind the scenes there’s a whole mess of blood and gore and crying, pain and broken things and little girls crying with their families after refusing to see their dead mothers right after they die.

I fucking hated the ICU. Just the door to enter it felt like we were going into a prison, and the fact that we had to have IDs and specific passes was unsettling. I remember walking through the corridors and seeing people laying there battered and worn, just like you, and it made me sick to my stomach. I hate wearing rubber gloves now because they smell like hospitals. Like death.

Me and Ryan found out that you had pancreatic cancer not too long before you went. I remember it was a family meeting in the living room when you were still living at the house, and you and Dad talked us through it, about how the chances were slim that you’d live to tell the tale, and how Dad said we’d “get through this. As a family.”

There weren’t many lights in the ICU, and the entrance was more of a back-entrance than anything. Hardly anything about it felt inviting and warm. That’s something I’ve always hated about hospitals, too. Why does everything have to feel so cold? Like you’re just voluntarily walking into a place where people kick the bucket and there’s nothing you can fucking do about it?

Welcome to Orange Park Medical, I hope you like our white walls and white floors and light beige bathrooms that smell like rubber. Don’t mind the super long hallways that make you feel like you’re trapped in some place people only go to die. Oh, and sorry for making the waiting rooms so fucking cluttered, as if you weren’t panicking enough already waiting to see your loved one. If you get a panic attack we’ll just wheel you away in some big lonely room so you can kick the bucket just like they will.

The last time I saw you was a Sunday, I think? It would’ve been October 23rd, 2005 if I’m thinking clearly. I was still so unshaken. You even let me watch Code Lyoko on your TV while you talked about more serious things with Dad and Granny.

I never thought it would happen to me. Never thought you’d die, never thought I’d end up being one of those kids who becomes a half-orphan and is left to fend for themselves and bond with someone who was away for months at a time because of the navy. Never thought I’d be a statistic. Never thought I’d be part of a family you see in those commercials about cancer. Never thought I’d give a shit about how breast cancer gets all the donations when pancreatic cancer is so much more inoperable and yet nobody cares about it.

I guess I just never thought, did I?

Of everything, I remember the next day the most. How Dad came home and cried as he said you “didn’t make it” and how me and Ryan and Dad huddled together while Granny was off to the side giving her own sympathies. God shot our feet and we were all left to figure out how to stand on stumps, staggering from the blood loss. I didn’t want to see your dead body. Thinking about how you looked at the open-casket viewing was sickening, how your skin looked so fake and latex that it gives me flashbacks to hospitals and how much I hated sitting in too many waiting rooms to count.

So that’s why I sat in the little waiting room in the ICU with our neighbors Mrs. Barbara and Mrs. Sarah comforting me, both of them crying along with me while Ryan and Dad went to see you one last time. I was a little girl. I hadn’t even gotten my first period yet and I was still so squeamish to the sight of someone in real life who had lost their life. I’m still the same little kid who looks away to gore and death especially when it’s not a staged movie or video game. I’m still the same girl who cries too much when things get out of my control, when I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

I’m not sure what triggered me to write this. It’s probably the hundredth thing I’ve written about you, Mom, and I’m sure you’ve seen what else I’ve written about you. I don’t think I’ll ever let it die. I don’t think I’m supposed to, either. When you let go of pain, you may lose the constricting feeling of suffocation that sets in as you think about it. But then you lose a part of your own self, the part that makes you fear and trust and not trust and worry, defend yourself and think back on what you did wrong, the little quirks that stem from the hurt like my hatred of hospitals and the fact that I can’t look at the parking garage outside my window without thinking of St. Vincent’s and how big and empty the whole thing was, your room and the lobbies.

I’ll probably write about it forever. I don’t mind that. It’s not the fact that I’m still hung up over it and I can’t let it go. Sometimes I need to remind myself of my roots and why I drew you for AP Art my senior year, why I have a picture of you and I in the 90s standing outside our house hanging up in my dorm, why my dad says I’m just like you, why it scares me to think that I’ll never know what I’d be like if you were still here, why I’m still writing songs and stories about you, why I still have dreams where you’re alive, why sometimes I break down and cry and pray to you that things will get better, that you’ll give me strength and courage to get through another day on my own, why I know you’re up there watching over me because you haven’t let me fuck up too badly yet.

And it sucks, living in a city I don’t know. It hurts when I get lost and have to pull over into a convenience store to gather myself and get a sense of direction for where I am, so far away from Middleburg and familiarity. I feel the weight of an anvil on my chest when I think about how homesick I am and how I wish I was still the little kid doodling away in the corner of your hospital room, still so unaware of what was to come and how hard it would be for me to make friends and be normal for once.

But in a way I guess I’m still the same ten-year-old who turns a blind eye to everything that’s out of my control and pushes the worrisome things to the side for better distractions while simultaneously crying about the future and how uncertain it’s become after the unpredictable happened. It’s probably why I have pictures on my dorm wall of you and me, of me and Ryan, of me and Dad, of Dad giving Ryan and I bunny ears in our 2009 Christmas family photo. Of the Taylor family reunion in summer 2010, of me, Ryan, Steven, Shaun and Granny, of Kris and I at Halloween 2012 and Prom 2013, of my 18th birthday with probably my only true friends.

I cried a lot the first few days out here in Orlando when my roommate wasn’t even here yet. It was from a pitiful sense of loneliness and homesickness and the realization that even though I’m 18 years old, I’m totally not cut out to be an ‘adult.’ I’m trying. I really am, I promise you. No matter how much it probably seems like I’m not, I swear, I’m trying to grow up.

I’ve been writing a lot of stories and drawing tons of characters as means of coping over the years. Somehow, my most recent story has struck a chord with me in a way that’s most relevant right now. Growing up doesn’t mean losing the spark that keeps you creative. It just means you learn to control it. ‘Cause God knows I can’t control a whole lot in my life, but one thing I can control is my art. I’m working to do that.

And even though it’s pained me for the past eight years to have to face facts that my life just isn’t the same anymore, in other ways, it’s given me inspiration like nothing else. I don’t want to seem like I’m making light of tragedy. I don’t want to shrug it off. I just want…closure, I guess. It’s something I’ve never gotten from this. I want to feel like everything made sense and everything happened for a reason, and that’s why I’ve been hung up for so long. Maybe I’m kidding myself. Maybe it’s just a band-aid. So be it. Things could always be worse, or at least that’s what I tell myself.