His
name was Chris and I waited forty minutes to be shown to his cubicle
and answer embarrassing questions about myself between long silences
where he would pencil my answers into his paper work and I would look
at the pictures of his family thumb tacked to the walls and wonder
about his daughter and wonder if he ever wondered that I'm a
daughter, too; but I didn't go back after that, and the agency sent
me three of the same letter over a few weeks before we forgot about
each other until tonight when I can't sleep and the stories eddy
through my narrator making desperate the fact that at 4am there isn't
anyone to hear.
And
I remember they all thought it was funny, the nurses, that I would
sit and read the whole packet front to back, but what did they expect
me to do, color another mandala, how many mandalas can one color
between 5am vitals and 10pm lights out? I chose COPE out of the
three agencies because it had the most hopeful sounding name, it had
something to offer, the ability to, acquire the skill to, learn how
to, and yet, just as taking the pills I had turned into a daily
ritual of self punishment, in the back of my mind coping always felt
like a cop out, like not really solving the problem, like giving up
and resigning oneself to living with it, so that reaching out for the
hope COPE had to offer was perverted into telling myself I'd really
given up.
And
at the end of my last semester of college we did a big concert in
Centennial hall where admission was one can of food for the food
bank, and I myself had been too embarrassed to go to my interview for
food stamps earlier that month, so I didn't bring anything to
donate, I needed all the food in my house, which was about one can of
black beans and one watermelon, but then backstage they said we were
to line up and drop out cans into a box in front of the stage one by
one, making a big show of the school's generosity, before we took our
seats in the orchestra. Panicked and embarrassed I had to ask my
section mate for a can to donate, and he gave it without questions,
without funny looks, and to this day when I think about gratitude
that instance replays itself in my mind. And I remember being on
stage, being applauded before the concert began, and I stood there,
being looked at by a crowd of hundred for whom I was to perform, but
not being seen by them, I stood there, in the midst of a great public
show of all that the university did for the community, of all that
the kindness of these people did for those less fortunate people, I
stood there, hungry, broke, with a concert to play, for all these
generous, generous, generous people.
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