Broken
1.
I fall asleep in the tube while having an MRI of my left shoulder.
The technician said that was a first for her—but the warm blanket just put me right under, not matter the banging that always reminds me of being inside a metal can while someone beats on it with a baseball bat.
2.
I went to the party. I am one of these women.
3.
My room at the Comfort Inn has a large wheelchair accessible shower.
And—a jacuzzi next to the bed. Just in sunken into the carpet, not even surrounding by tile.
I think it is their handicapped accessible / honeymoon suite.
I am not on my honeymoon.
4.
We were happy. Always. All of us.
5
In the Rijksmuseum, there is a clock. Or rather a video installation called “Grandfather Clock” inside the face of a grandfather clock. The card next to it says, “If there is one word that sums up the essence of everything the Rijksmuseum does, it must be time. An awareness of time and a sense of beauty—that’s what the Rijksmuseum shows. Our tastes change and we grow older as relentlessly as time passes. The museum captures time, standing as a beacon in the changing world.”
Inside the clock face, the artist, Maarten Baas, appears behind the fogged glass as if in a shower, using a marker or crayon to add the hands, then he rubs them away again.
I would not say he is saying the museum captures time. I think he is saying time is an illusion. Or at least an unclear concept.
Time is broken. Or, at least, is something we made up.
6.
There are enough sweets for everyone.
7.
In Montevideo, I fall flat on the sidewalk. Bam. And go with my friend Virginia to the British Hospital, which is the fanciest in the city. The receptionist turns out to have lived next door to Virginia when they were little. This sort of thing happens so often in Uruguay it is more unusual when it doesn’t.
My hand is x-rayed—though the doctor agrees with me that probably nothing is broken. After some consideration, my ribs too. At first the doctor, a young woman, says what I have been thinking—that it is not worth the radiation of an x-ray since, broken or not, the treatment for the ribs is the same. Time. But after she pokes at them a bit, she says she is a bit worried about a fragment or splinter close to my lungs. When are you flying? she asks. I tell her in 12 days.
Hmmm, she says, if it was a month, I wouldn’t worry but if it is that close, we better have an x-ray of your ribs too. We don’t want anything puncturing your lung.
In the end, nothing is broken. But, the doctor says, those ribs are going to hurt for a while.
And they do.
8.
In this world, there is love enough . . .
9.
. . . for everyone.
Except, maybe, you.
