2:30AM

06.07.2017

2:30AM

I am currently sitting in a hospital room by my father's side. He is wheezing through his mouth as he has been for nearly 50 hours, half asleep - half delirious. It's like a nightmare for him, gasping through his mouth while his nose and face is wrapped in a web of gauze and tape. I have spent the last few nights here, keeping vigil, while mom rests back home, until the morning. Holding his hand is all I can do, which means my presence is essentially of no help and only my own consolation.

I have done this so many times before. My real grandmother was always frail. When I was in high school, my internship in the Emergency Room ended at 8pm every day. Once my things were packed and my ID was swiped, I took the back elevator to the 6th floor where the ICU sprawled across four halls. I would switch with my real mother, and stay the night. Eerily, my grandmother also wheezed like this, the only difference was that she never woke enough to see that someone was at her side. 10 paces down the hall, there was a vending machine that I befriended and was the only thing that could entice me enought to leave the hospital room. I spent four years of my teenage life intermittedly living in the hospital three to four weeks at a time five or six times a year. Funnily, the reason I was late to my first ever high school class was because I had lost the parking ticket to leave the hospital parking lot. Nobody knew that I showered in the hospital gym at 6am in the morning before appearing for my 8am classes for nearly my entire high school career. In fact, this is the first time that I have ever spoken about this period of my life. 

It's a hard thing to remember about, let alone say: which can only mean that I still have not come to terms with my loss of time. I can say now that I desperately wanted to be a kid, but the then me felt too responsible to be shopping with friends or chatting with classmates after school. I used to think that I was much more grown up than my peers, and that it was a good thing. But I can say now that I grew up too fast and missed out on too much that it affected my health and my mental growth as an individual years later. My goals were singular, more absolute that anything else. Take care of grandma, help mom, study well. Nothing else mattered, everything else was materialistic and selfish. This focus was a great thing, but brittled my relationships because I put everyone at a distance. Friendship was difficult concept for me grasp: the loyalty to something other than your parents and family, the wasted time on endless texting, time spent away from home. How could someone justify that? Of course, I had classmates that I enjoyed sharing conversation and jokes - good memories - but even to this day, I speak to no one in my past. Maybe everyone is busy with trying to set up the rest of their lives; I believe this to make myself feel better. I am admitting the most interesting things today. 

Why am I writing a blog about this of all things? I am not sure myself, but I have a lot of issues in my life that I can't seem to resolve in my brain. Writing them down in my notebook seem to only be an extension of the loop, around and around images churn without resting. I hope that creating a blog with a few readers will help me feel as if it is an outlet rather than only a mirror that stares back. 

Admittedly, this will probably be a mess of a channel. Nothing aesthetic, just an online composition notebook with food stained pages and bic pen smears. But maybe, while this helps me, it might help someone else too.