Sunrise, at Night, in a Hospital

                 
It’s just like all those shitty plans and stories. It’s just like the sobering morning after the punch-drunk night. It’s the same feeling you get waking up each morning and finding how worthless all the night’s dreams have been. In the night you know all your plans and you know they’ll work because they can’t fail but in the morning it’s not there anymore. The night is a dream but the morning is reality. The night should come with a warning label, something that will tell you that all things will appear better in the night. But then in the morning it’s reality, it’s shitty and it’s the mind-fuck of the century. This is why the human being will cringe at the traditional sound of an alarm clock going off.
               
I could tell her it’s all a lie right now and break her heart or I could let her believe it too for a little while longer. I could let her sleep a little bit longer suspended in the memory of the night or I could get her up and let her to sober up to the world as it is. I’ll let her sleep. As if I could wake her up if I wanted to, that’s funny. But I would have let her sleep anyways, even if I could wake her up.

This is the morning of an entire generation. This is the trick.
               
It’s like a fever, for me, waking up every morning. The hot panicking sudden realization that I am not special. Today the sun will rise on me, it will rise on her and it will rise on the murderers, the thieves and the perverts. It will rise on the best and worst and because it rises on you does not make you one or the other. The sun will rise on bleaching bones and barely born babies. It is indescriminate and inexorable. Just remember that the sun will rise even after you’re dead and remember that because it does rise doesn’t mean you’re anything to it
               
I’m nothing and still it rises for me.
         
But it won’t even rise on her anymore, they’ll shove her so deep into the dirt that light won’t ever touch her again. This is the way we do it.
         
The seats aren’t so comfortable. They have rows and rows of these seats with little tables in between some of the chairs that they stack high with magazines. Horrible magazines about fashion and movie stars and cooking. Who the fuck is going to read about how to make a perfect Thanksgiving style dinner while in the waiting room of the Emergency Room. I don’t give a damn about the new Ben Affleck movie in the hospital, and I doubt I would give a damn about it even given a change of scenery. Low-rise jeans are perfect for reading about while they put her under the knife.
         
Under the knife is an old expression made horribly vivid given the circumstances and my imagination. I see her literally under a large scalpel, her soft beautiful skin peeling gruesomely away in its wake, reveal all of her insides for the filthy world. No, stomp the bad thoughts out.
         
This was her favorite magazine. Sixty-nine quickies on how to please your man, what shit. Julia Roberts tells how she does it, it must not be very hard. These were the things that interested her and I begin to wonder why I ever had such an interest in her. Some prick of a clothes designer unveils his new line in Paris instead of Milan for the first time and it causes a big stir in all of these magazines. This is the collective interest of a sleeping generation.
         
Across the way there is a young boy waiting for his brother who has a broken arm and he is crying. He’s crying right onto the sterility of the damned hospital. He’s crying next to his mother who is too young to be a mother and is reading an identical copy of the magazine I’m holding, she’s brushing up on sixty-nine ways to please her man while one of her sons’ bone is being set and her other son is crying. What a generation our parents have created. It’s not even entirely our parents’ fault. Is it mine, our's?
         
I put down the magazine and sit up straighter in my chair because the way I slouch is starting to depress me. It’s hot so I take my coat off and I painfully tear away the congealed blood on my arm taking tiny hairs with it. This is the cut you hid from the doctor, I remind myself because I’m losing my mind and my memory all at once in this shitty sterile ER.
         
                                          *    *    *    *    *

“Do you remember this scar? Do you remember how you gave it to me?” Maybe I'll ask of her five years into the future when this is all that remains of our car wreck.
         
“No.” She might answer, because we only remember the pleasant things. It is a sunset on a foreign beach that I’ve only ever seen in my dreams and all the cuts that were once on her face have melted back into the perfection that was once her skin. I look at the scar on my arm and almost lose the memory of where it came from, then suddenly I remember where it came from but know I’ll only lose it again in a few moments, I only remember the nice things now.
         
“This is the scar you gave me when you smashed my car into that truck. Do you remember this scar?” I asked wondering why my scars are still there and hers aren’t. Maybe it has to do with the fact that this is all just a dream, that this never happened and now never will. A god damn dream that I’ll have to wake up from soon. But everyday now I spend more time with her on this beach, in my dreams, and one day I won’t ever have to leave it or her.
         
“I never did that.” She says and I’m inclined to disagree but find that I can’t remember what I accused her of doing anymore.
         
“Maybe not.” I say because it’s too pretty on this beach to think of anything else. I wonder why my memory slips more with every day spent on this beach with her, I know one day I’ll remember nothing of the days before the beach. Well at least this is how I’d like it to be, later on, but this is just a dream. I don’t think we’ll ever meet again, even after life is over and all the questions answered.
         
But five years from now is not now nor will it ever be now for me. I feel cursed enough that I might just remain in this one hellish night forever.

                                              *  *  *  *  *
         
The lights reflect off of the polished tile floor like a distorted sun on a dark sea. The lights, like the sheets, are torture to anyone who is fond of human touch. I can remember my stay in the hospital from years before, the white plain sheets and the polished metal on everything that wasn’t plastic was killing me. I hate hospitals, give me a muddy hole to die in any day over the hospital. I hope she is coping better than I ever did with the cold formality of the hospital.
         
The nurse at the front desk is reading a novel she has almost finished. The main character is an iron jawed man of unspeakable nobility, he never lies and never cheats, except when it is for the common good. He is always defending the common good against terrible injustices and every now and then he has a moral conflict just to show he isn’t a complete robot, you know the kind of guy that has never existed. Half of our movies, books and songs are about these kinds of guys, the kind that you’d like to identify with but never could. She had known this man by several names and as a woman sometimes too and she loved him every time she ran into him in all the cheap books she read or dumb sitcoms on TV she saw and she never knew they were all the same person. The new age romanticism role model, the phony. I hope all of her new age romanticism did her good in the end, all those movie stars and noble beliefs. I hope that in the end the knowledge of Brad Pitt’s birthday did her a hell of a lot of good. Because that’s all the new romanticists are, people so scared that the world might be ugly that they surround them with beautiful lives that aren’t really theirs.
         
Even now as I tell the doctor that I don’t believe him, I really do, she’s dead. I knew she was as I sat on the curb by the side of the road and they pulled her into the ambulance on a gurney.
         
I’m a realist, or perhaps a cynic. I am now more than ever. Something like that wreck will sober you up damn good. It’ll sober you up like a sunrise will, with the dare to make good on all the plans you made in the night. I was going to marry her, that was the plan, no this was just another hung over morning from the best night of my life. She was something of a new age romantic, not like the old kind, Byron and his group, she was the new romantic the kind that read fashion magazines and saw movies that mapped her life out just as she wanted it, the new age romantics who cheered the perfect quip at the perfect timing and loved everything that would never happen to them in real life, but wished it would. I would pick old Lord Byron’s form of romanticism over this new saccharine debacle that relies on fashion magazines rather than poems for its inspiration. 
         
She made a realist out of me.
         
They’ll leave you alone for a while after they tell you that everything beautiful in the world is dead with a tube shoved down its throat and its rib cage cracked open exposing its heart for the whole fucking world. They’ll leave you alone to decipher all of this right after it happens. But they’ll be watching you to be sure, no outbursts, let’s keep this whole death thing nice and clean, it’s how the new age romantics would want it, prim and pressed like all the smiling people that they tell you everyone looks like. 
         
After it dies you’ll want to remember the last impression you got from this beautiful thing that has gone. So when it’s a person you’ll inevitably remember the last thing this person said to you.
         
The car was going along highway 118 in between Somis and Moorpark, past the tree nursery and onto the stretch of highway that was deserted at two in the morning. The city of Moorpark was completely laid out before us as we descended down towards it along this road with its many curves and small dirt roads leading to and from the fields along it.
         
“Jesus Christ, I forgot to pick up my pills today.” She had said and this was the last thing she said before that truck with no headlights pulled out and we slammed right into it. It was a dirty last impression. It was horrible and it wasn’t at all romantic.
         
So you think back to what you really want for the last impression, something to make you feel better.
         
“All the streetlights look like stars and we could just drive right up to them and stay with them forever. They look so warm and welcoming.” This wasn’t so bad and she had said it just before those other words.
         
But remember what you said, always remember what you said. “They’re just as distant as the other stars, for all the good they are to us.” What had you meant? Nothing, only to shoot her down. She wouldn’t have done that to you but you had no problem doing it to her.
         
Then suddenly I found myself standing outside of the hospital doors, I don’t know how I got out there, but there I was standing in the darkness of the early morning. The cold air felt good, kind of like nothing had happened, no catastrophic accident hours before had snuffed out the only worthwhile life on earth. For a second I felt at peace until I started to shiver and threw up into the grass by the cement sidewalk leading up to the Emergency Room.

I looked out past the parking lot and down the hill to where the streetlights lit up every street in the city. It wasn’t Moorpark. They had taken us to Ventura in the ambulance but those were all still streetlights, the warm little inviting stars that she had seen on our way home. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I sure as hell wasn’t going into work the next day, I couldn’t go home, to our house. So I stood there trying to figure the rest of my life out in a split second.

I thought about finding a car and driving to all the streetlights and running up to every house and knocking on every door and asking for love and hope and to be welcomed in with open arms, just to prove her right. But then I thought of finding a bar where I knew I wouldn’t be rejected as long as my cash supply held out.
And which one would you have chosen? Honestly. Fuck the houses, they would never let me in, they would call the cops because there was a man asking for love at their front door at three in the morning. I ended up drunk in a park with a pint of rum because all the bars were closed.