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May
- August 1998
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I
was in the dying room. You know the one. It's quiet. People
slip in and out as though they were never even there.
Festering in a bed for three months, I had grown tired.
My arms were like soft baguettes, splintered with freckles
for seeds. Lips a permanent shade of blue; colourless
fingers and toes - lily matchsticks without the red ends.
My hair had been falling out and I had forgotten how to
use my legs. Twenty-one not out. For every year, I had
lived four, so I was a pale vintage just short of eighty-five.
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1 |
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Sick
of white sheets. Sick of fluorescent lights. Sick of ward
vagrants hobbling into my room, bottles full of piss asking
for my help, their gowns askew showing flat and wrinkly
bums and saggy, hairless balls. Sick of drowning.
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2 |
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Friday
21 August 1998. Eight pm.
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Watched
Burke's Backyard and said goodbye to my family for the
night. Said hello to a morphine bolus. Like a little death
itself, those two greetings. Interweave me, you two thick
threads - one flame licking at the other in awe, in need
of a partner, show me mercy.
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3 |
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Saturday
22 August. Midnight, or just after.
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In
rushes Daisy, my midnight oriental muse who injected drugs
into my chest to give me another day's grace so that one
life could be taken and given to another.
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4 |
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Tonight
it was my turn. Eight months and twenty-two days I had
waited for my beeper to beep. But instead of the velveteen
hustle of the beeper, it was a phone call, shrill and
cutting. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Hang up the phone and nurses
amble in, tears a ruse before I'm carried into the toilet
where I piss out blood for the last time.
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5 |
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My
possessions gathered up - my Auden and Heaney, my copper
bookmark and a sputum cup - the room looking like I had
never been there. Flowers on my bedside table held me
to ransom - the colours having taken on a death hue. I
winched my wasted legs into jeans, my flat bum loathe
to fill the denim mould. Found a shirt that masked my
bony barrelled chest, breasts shrivelled long ago, but
ready to be full again, while Daisy wedged my blue feet
into my stinking blue connies and succoured me with a
jab of morphine.
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6 |
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