go boldly

Looking out across the floor of blue I watched the gym crawl with girls like swarming ants on the sidewalk.  The gym was lit.  The night behind it dark. 

Underneath the pain of a headache I sighed into the most dangerous thought, "Why are we doing this- any of it?" I flinched at the abyss on the other side.

I thought of the look on Jordan's face the day he leaned in shutting the book lying in front of me on the table.  In his rush he knocked over a white paper coffee cup. Carmel colored suds floated free.  They rolled to the white fan of pages in my bio chem notebook kissing the edges and seeping into the bindings. 

"Why are we doing this?" he asked, desperation raining in his words.

  

"Oh god, don't ask that!" I snapped at him. 

The landscape of the Marriot Library burning in yellow light. Outside it was snowing. The street lamps in the parking lots the only witnesses to the beauty of the whiteness. Deep winter nights and walkways of ice surrounded us.

"If you start to question this that will be it, it will be over." I hissed at him worried he might break the fragile spell for all of us. 

Jordan and I had been side by side for 15 hours.  Since 7:33 am when he threw himself down in the seat beside me still smelling of heavy sleep.  I soaked it in like sunlight.
  

I had come to lower campus from the Hospital through the snow beating the army of plows.  The hem of thin scrubs soaking wet.  I had spent the night on the graveyard shift in the ER.  I had not slept and I would not sleep for 48 more hours.  My head pounding.  My heart tired.  Dehydration taking its slow but eager toll.

Together we attended lectures during the day.  Drank coffee from disposable cups.  We wove our way between the halls and doors of science buildings going from lecture to lab and back. 

I had kids in the valley.  Jordan had a dog in the hills. 

On the test result rolls pinned to the auditorium doors, our student numbers clung among the top 10 spots- speciously close together.

I fed him the crushed contents of my packed lunch.  I avoid the nightly trek for dinner down to the dingy row of restaurants clinging to the edge of campus. 

He handed me coffee whenever he appeared and corrected my math whenever I went astray. 

I wrote all our lab reports and most of his papers.  He would sit on the grimy lab floor his back against the cabinets reading me the lab instructions like they were Shakespeare.   

I wrote poetry that framed my science notes.  He doodled the one pen stroke genetics mouse on the covers of all my books.  

Young women looked sheepishly at him.  They smiled at up at his towering beauty.  They blushed at his at blueness of his eyes and the thickness of his fingers.  They wondered what sort of a fool I was to not see him as they did.

But I did see him.  He was indeed beautiful.  Only my view was filtered through the shadow of another man.  A man no one would ever eclipse. 

Jordan would lay his head on my shoulder when he was tired. Press his weight against me. He would look at me so unsure of his position. Baffled that I would allow him so near without letting him in at all.  He was sure he could figure me out and he would stare at me the same way he stared down a physics exam. 

The day I collapsed in physiology in front of 250 other students I woke to him beside me crying.  I shook his concerns off like they were dust.     

When I was truly tired I would evade everyone.  Wander off to go sit in the overstuffed chair I liked to read in at the end of a long lonely hall. 

Eventually, Jordan would find me there.  Not hiding the effort of his hunt. Push his way in to sit beside me, and I would let him. No matter how painful it was to have him there wading into the murky waters beside me. His presence a constant reminder of the absence of the other.

     

Together we collected the ends of the days in the belly of the library surround by other members of the Biology Court.

It was madness, all of it.  The hours, the pressure, the loss of everything else...

The reason you do something like that is love.  The reason you chase and persist, cry and fight, throw books and scramble after papers, the reason you walk out into the cold, dark night, again and again, is love.

One day Beach will look back at the hours that stretched into years in this horrible sport with the same feeling I have looking back at my pursuit of medicine. She will regret nothing and everything all at once. And she would want to do all again just be there in the middle of its madness one more time.

My dreams drip of him.  Not of Jordan but of the man whose shadow he tried so long to stand in.  Why are we doing this, any of it? Don't ask that question unless you are already done.

Go Boldly, mlb; written in U of U Cadaver Lab 2005

Go boldly into your nightmares.

Your daydreams are mounting their revenge.

Go boldly or don't go at all.
Don't question the snowy path, it holds no answers.
Do not rest among the cold stones.

Do not believe the look on my face, it is not for you.
I pause with the silence of the dead not yet sleeping.
Long lost between the lines of a book and the edge of a bed.

I look out from the fading light of his shelter at a world I no longer believe in.

In sleep, I whisper his name and you answer with the softness of child.

Go boldly into your nightmares and let them become your dreams.