Real Love Answers the Phone
The flight from Cleveland landed at one in the afternoon, and I sent the text from the hard airport chair with my purse clutched in my lap and my small suitcase standing beside my knee. Can someone pick me up? My flight lands at 1 p.m.
I watched the little message sit in the family group chat while the airport moved around me the way airports do, indifferent and continuous, full of families reuniting near baggage claim and businessmen rolling carry-ons and a young mother laughing as her toddler kicked both shoes loose in midair. Three weeks in Cleveland had made me see ordinary things differently. The way a mother just picked up those small shoes without a second thought.
The way a man held the door for someone he did not know. My hand trembled slightly. Whether from the medication, the exhaustion, or something more basic than either, I could not tell anymore.
Twenty-three days earlier I had boarded a flight to Ohio alone and checked into a hospital bed in a city where I did not know a single street name. I had signed waivers acknowledging that I might bleed out, stroke out, or simply not wake up from the anesthesia. I had listened through the night to the woman behind the curtain in the next bed crying softly while nurses moved in and out on soft shoes.
I had faced the real possibility of dying in a strange city without a familiar hand to hold. I had told my family it was a minor procedure because I did not want to worry them. That was what I had always done, for as long as I could remember.
I softened the edges of my own pain so other people would not have to rearrange their lives around it. My phone finally vibrated. We’re too busy today.
Just call an Uber. Diana. My daughter-in-law of fifteen years, the woman whose children I had watched four days a week while she built her career at Meridian Pharmaceuticals.
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