The wife of the other patient came in and
helped her skinny mother down onto a potty.
She guided her down, without any privacy, shitting or pissing in the
crowded hallway of a hospital whose white walls were marked in a collage of
brown and grey scuffs and handprints from waist height creeping downward
toward the dull tiled floor. I entered
the 6thPopulateHospital through the emergency entrance, scouting signs that my new friend
told me to look for from her mobile phone.
Searching though aisles of patients lined up in corridors and clearings,
peeking at all the different faces and hurting bodies, this version of medical
care was like nothing I have seen before.
An hour before, Jutta called me just as I
was getting ready to leave my house to hang out by the pool. She was nervous and reaching out to tell me
that she was in the hospital because her respiratory infection had worsened
since I saw her the night before. She
was all alone, and hooked up to an IV. “I’m
being fed antibiotics which I’m afraid that I might be allergic too, and I’m
just scared that I might die here, and no one will know.” We had just shared an Indian dinner together
some 12 hours before, and had only met exactly one week earlier, and now she
was in the hospital, and I was her only friend.
Insisting the same way that I might, that it wasn’t necessary for me to
come to visit her, I just told her to tell me the address of the hospital and packed
a small bag of magazines and snacks, so I could offer whatever solace I could
bring. Hopping in a cab, and finally
arriving about 30 minutes later, I cruised the hallways with my horse blinders
on because I learned quickly that the injuries of these emergency patients were
not the same as the ones that I had witnessed with my mother when she worked in
an E.R. It took one bag of blood, hastily wrapped around the gushing foot of an
injured man, a large pin through the foot of another man propped up in a wooden
contraption, and another crushed foot, all black, before I could tame my
curiosity. Family members were crowded
around all the different patients, and I breezed through the corridors, until
finally I heard, “ Kristin!” A hug
proceeded and Jutta was sitting up on her little hospital bed, with her legs
crossed Indian style. I sat down beside
her, asked her the kinds of questions that you might imagine, and finally went
to go and get her something to eat since she
hadn’t eaten anything since she arrived five hours before, and had a horrible
taste in her mouth. A few minutes later,
with food that I bought at a local restaurant outside the hospital, we sat together,
marveled at her chest x rays, discussed her situation a little, and figured
that she ought to try to come to my house instead of spending the night
there. Eventually I left to spend a
little time outside during one of the most beautiful summer day’s that Shanghai
has had to offer, and finally went to yoga before meeting her back at my
apartment where I set up a bed and could share my presence with her.
Jutta is a girl I met at the yoga studio a
week ago, and was immediately drawn to her.
She’s beautiful and smallish, her hair is dark, and she makes all these
quirky dancer motions with her body. She’s
fluid and romantic, intuitive, intelligent, and awakens a part of myself that I
thought I left in Cranford New Jersey when I wore a lot black clothing and had pasty skin. It’s somewhat unappealing to visit that part
of myself again, but it sparkles under the guidance of all that I have been
through and learned since those days eleven years ago. We’ve even galloped around in our underpants
together, since we’ve already exposed parts of our inner selves that’s a whole
lot more revealing. By the time it’s all said and done, the second week of
knowing one another, will have been spent living together. She does some work
at home while I practice yoga in the morning, goes to the hospital in the
afternoon while I’m at work, and returns home, to greet me when I finally get
back after yet another couple of hours at the yoga studio. We hug at bedtime,
we have breakfast together, get massaged, mistaken for twins, and have taken
the fast lane to sharing our lives with each other. If we were both in New York, native
to that city, we’d never be faced with this kind of new friendship.
Yesterday arriving home, exhausted, and accustomed to basking in an
empty apartment without any clothes on, I was a little concerned what
it was going to be like to see her when all I wanted to do was eat and
sleep. Arriving home, to a giggleing gentle Jutta, my anxiety
melted. From what I can see, she's incredible. She speaks Chinese, Japanese, German, and English. She's an
economics guru, from a small village in Germany, with a Vietnamese
father and German mother. Like me she was raised catholic, and
like me, she's happy to explore all kinds of spiritual expressions.
Maybe this is just a perfect little affair, at just the right time for
both of us, and we'll lose touch next week with the same kind of energy
that brought us together, but for now, needing someone, is so well understood by each of us, that we’ve just
opened right up to this experience. All
foreigners wouldn’t do the same, but it’s undeniable that all foreigners understand
the feeling.
Opened by the events of the last 25 years,
culminating into the events of the last four, translated into the this and that
of the last year and half, adding up to the last couple of weeks, and to today,
and to the now; it’s the ultimate computation, it’s the arithmetic of
life. The last couple of weeks have been
especially sudden in their progress. Maybe,
I’m just at that biological age when shit starts to reveal itself, or if it all
just fits together, forming this grand state of awareness for today, but
recently I’ve been turned on, and certainly bombarded. I even think it’s manifested itself into a
seething abscess in the back of my mouth.
I was lucky to receive help from my Chinese teacher, Creek, who brought
me medicine and sat with me while I drifted into the cloudy world of perfectly
suited narcotics instead of studying together last week. I visited the dentist the day before, who
told me there was an infection in my bone which we could try to clear up with
antibiotics, but the pain intensified exponentially over the next twenty four
hours, and by the time she arrived at my house I was head first between a
pillow and the sofa, with deep indentations in my face to prove how long I had
been stuck there. Unable to open my left
eye, creeping along to invite her in as my black silk bathrobe hung
down over my shoulders, and finally, with the help that I am ever so grateful
for, Creek and her doctor- sister shared, exactly what I needed, at exactly the
right time. I decided that this tooth
issue was the physical proof of all the emotional changes I was
encountering. Like a child, loosing her
teeth, beginning her transition to adulthood, my infection signified something
with much greater meaning. There was a
lot of poison in my head that was deciding to come out, now, and it had worked
its way into a bubbling puss pocket, eventually oozing out, followed by
instantaneous relief. I had suffered
immensely, and couldn’t even move or swallow, until finally the pain peaked in its
torture, and I was granted relief with the help of an unexpected hand from a
friend and biology.
Last week, I started negotiating to change my schedule to a part time one, and I’m at the beginning stages
of figuring out how to make this life, one that fulfills me. This opportunity to open things up, and
finally seek the kind of satisfaction that I hadn’t known how to piece together
until recently, fills me with excitement and a little anxiety. Space to move around in, and customized time
schedules are not exactly what makes the heart of a corporate office tick, so I
started the conversation with my boss, knowing that I was probably going to
have to resign if he didn’t take to my suggestions. After calmly reporting my
expectations for this job and my new one, my boss finally just told me to
reconsider my decision before reconvening the next day. The littlest manager, a woman just slightly
older then I am, suggested that this new arrangement was not going to work,
because the boss doesn’t want me to divide my focus, and if I wasn’t satisfied
here, that we could try to do different things within the confines of my grey
laminate desktop, and modest exposure to sunlight. Knowing full well that I had
already made my decision a long time ago, and was just now seeing a way to do
it, I listened carefully to her suggestions, but reconfirmed my feelings about working part
time. Somehow the boss man talked me
into doing it for just one month which I agreed to, but I already know that
next month I might have another discussion with him. I know that I'm just at the beginning, and need to take this leap with
total disregard to the possible consequences of losing my job. I’m
not doing what I love, even if I do get a fairly awesome paycheck each
month. With a trillion dollars in bills
haunting me in America for my superior education, amongst other things, I’m making these
new decisions carefully, but not without risk. Next
month I could be unemployed, earning two
dollars an hour guiding Chinese people through sweating their guts out,
anxious
as hell about where my rent money is going to come from as my credit
declines
rapidly, but I’m mid air now, floating my arms out, trying to land
gracefully in the darkness, and who knows where I'm headed. Where
I’ve been for the last year and a half isn’t leading anywhere that I’m
satisfied with accepting, so, here I am, cutting bangs, awake at 6 am
to
practice, and shaking things up a bit while I spin around in a
whirlpool of
possibilities.
(I started this by flipping through Murakami,
and randomly selecting the first 8 words from some random paragraph, and
figuring out how to make it fit into the story that I wanted to tell)
Jutta and I
Jutta preparing supper.
Arriving home late that night, I thought for sure that I'd just go to
bed with a little mango sorbet in my stomach. Instead, Jutta
prepared a special dinner for us to share together on her last night at
my house. From the sofa, I could lay there, and watch what was
developing in the kitchen. I wasn't sure what to expect since she
had so many different ingredients from cheese to seaweed. It was
fun watching her, humming, with plaid underpants, and a shirt wrapped
around her head, reaching for all the many different things that came
together to make a really special dinner.
Delicious. Three distinctly different dishes all in one pan.
Sitting on the steps while she made dinner for me, I unwrapped
these remarkable little gifts, stunned at how kind she is.
This morning, I skipped my practice after a very late phone call complete with tears.
Sitting at my favorite little coffee place, Linda surprised me and popped in, just as I was starting breakfast.
We're really the cutest girls in Shanghai. I'm not kidding. =)