Your heart glows red

Those who have seen the lights of an operation theatre inside the covers of a book can have no idea of the fragility of life. The lights shoot through your skin and tissue and muscle and bone, and bring your particular pain into sharp relief. It is no use squeezing the warm hands of the doctor, she is in the conspiracy, along with the anesthetist who tells you to breathe deep even though she knows she is guiding you into a deep sleep not of your own making. The air is sweet-sick, like the texture of the blood. It is the blood that is central to the story, its absence and continued presence, its life giving and life taking abilities.

And how it leaves brown stains on the blue gown they give you, how it drips from their bedside smiles, how it leaks from the corners of your eyes when your twenty five years of age seems like such a small insurance against circumstances that are infinitely vaster than the scope of your imagination, than the breadth of your little palm clutching at the Indian nurse, than the diameter of your tiny vein pierced with the large, glistening needle. Your knuckle looks fragile, your heart is ready to burst.

All the time you think of words to describe these feelings if you ever get out alive. You try to memorize the exact shade of the beige curtains and the green scrub suits the attendants wear, and the dangerous gleam of the scalpel and the knife, and the translucent plastic of the mask, which is the most fearful of them all. Your atheism is cowering frightened in your womb, and ready to desert you, your faith frightened to enter, and you say, half in courage, half in desperate bravado, “No, I’m not afraid.”

This is the description. And if anything is more frightening than the experience, it is this: Ultimately, you are alone. Not physically, no. But your strength comes not from God or Love or Relationships or any of those fiercely competitive abstractions. They will fight amongst themselves, disputing each others’ existence, and leave you to be carried, wide eyed and petrified, on a narrow stretcher, into a narrow room, through a door. Above that door, a light glows red. But only as long as your heart glows red.