In Case of Emergency, Break Heart

What to remember and what to forget

Things to remember during an emergency:

• Remember to panic instantly when you get scooped and scraped and peeled out of unconsciousness by sharp knocks on your bedroom door, opening sticky eyes in the pitch black, your sleep-deprived brain begging you for five more minutes, promising and pleading that it’s just a bad dream, but knowing it’s not, knowing there will be no more sleep tonight. Or ever.

• Remember to put on a bra while stumbling around in your closet, so you’re decent when you answer the door for the paramedics.

• Remember turning on the porchlight, then open the front door, step out, and wave at dark figures casting flashlight beams over the front yard until they land on your frozen face.

• Remember to take a drink of water out of a smudged glass standing over the sink, because you can’t answer any questions with this cotton mouth, this croaky throat, these lips pressed so hard into a line, they’d look white in the mirror.

• Remember worrying about the ambulance sirens and lights in the middle of your quiet cul-de-sac waking up all the neighbors’ kids who run across the street without looking, and mine the gravel for sparkly rocks, and haven’t yet learned how to self-medicate their overwhelming feelings. They just scream in the backyard when it’s time to come in and while being wrestled into a five-point car seat. They only know how to scream and kick and wrap their monkey arms around their people’s necks and cry themselves to sleep. Their parents haven’t divorced, and they haven’t been betrayed by their best friend, and they haven’t received so many unsolicited dick pics they’ve lost count. So they don’t know yet about cutting into the soft flesh of their arms or smoking until their heads swim or purging every ounce of food they haven’t “earned.”

• Remember wondering if those kids’ parents think you’re a bad person and that this could never happen to them. Remember they’re people like you and the last time the ambulance screeched onto your street, your heart went out in the dark to whoever had to call it with shaky hands and how over the next days you were extra friendly to everyone you met on the street because you didn’t know which one was suffering those sleepless nights and that panicked coming to after drifting off for an hour.

• Remember to put your chapstick in your purse, because you don’t know how long you’ll be gone, but you do know having dry lips might just be the ridiculously small thing that will send you careening over the edge in those small hours of the morning when time stops and the loneliness and desperation bear down with such force, a speck of dust landing in the wrong spot might split you in half.

Things to forget during an emergency:

• Forget what the poison control guy says immediately after he says it and try to hand your phone to the paramedic next to you, because he’s just standing around without doing anything and you think they should be doing something but you don’t know what, only to have him tell you, I’m a cop, not a paramedic and you’re so confused about why they’re even in your hallway if they can’t help, and you feel stupid about forgetting the difference between cops and firefighters and EMTs and paramedics and what color their uniforms are.

• Forget how to spell your name when the paramedic asks you, looking at him blankly, J-U-L-I….what comes after I? What comes after I? Then asking if you can write it down on his notepad yourself but your hand is shaking so much that you feel bad he won’t be able to read it anyway.

• Forget your phone charger and glasses so you can worry about your battery running out and not being able to read stuff on your phone to distract you while you sit in the critical care unit waiting for someone to tell you they’ll be okay.

• Forget that sleep is a thing people do, because you will never sleep again, because if you never sleep again, you will never be woken up again by pounding on your bedroom door.

• Forget all the sounds of that night, not just the pounding of fists, but also the small, quivering voice on the other side of the door, the blood in your ears crashing against your skull in deafening waves, the siren sound you’ve only known from a safe distance until tonight, the crying and cursing and moaning coming out of every fluorescent box off the long hallway, the different beeps ranging in volume, frequency, and intensity from anxiety-triggering to full-out panic inducing although you never quite figure out which is which so you panic every time just in case.

People who might save you during an emergency:

• The cop who is not a paramedic, who seemed cold at first but maybe is just young, just inexperienced, just as powerless as you in this situation regardless of the weapon strapped to his hip, who asks if you want him to come to the hospital with you for support, which seems like an offer outside any official protocol.

• The EMT driving the ambulance while you’re in the passenger seat crying, who talks to you calmly, not promising anything, not pretending he knows things he doesn’t, but says very slowly as if to call your attention to every word, we’re not using the sirens and we’re not speeding.

• The paramedic who asks if you need a hug when you absolutely do and then holds you in a fluorescently-lit ER hallway for a long time, possibly seven seconds or more, and not awkwardly like a stranger but like he means it, while a drunk guy right next to you is yelling at a nurse to fuck off.

• The same nurse tapping you on the shoulder to hand you a cup of water and box of tissues while making direct eye contact, who doesn’t pretend there is anything helpful to say because she’s already seen it all and she knows there are no words to soothe the crash of inevitable human suffering with your surprise that it’s come for you this night and that you’re not special.

• The young nurse aide with the Southern accent who keeps calling you Ma’am, sounding strangely formal while he’s in the room with you constantly checking the bleeps and blinks, who brings you a warmed blanket when you’re freezing on the fold-out chair and then tucks it in around you as if he’s already experienced a hundred lifetimes of loss, and he says try to sleep, I will be here all night, keeping watch.