The Waiting Room
Unintentionally, I’m overthinking again. Someone is talking somewhere in the room about some light at the end of the tunnel. And all I can think of is what happens after. What started as a slow spill of the tourniquet has taken over me. Hot. Slippery. Unforgiving. In the hospital, most of us are somehow always thinking about suddenly disappearing. We spend so much time dreaming about leaving these spaces we inhabit; these sterile rooms and weary bodies. We wonder what it will be like when our lives can finally begin. After the illness, and the pain, and the need for an IV needle in the crook of your elbow ceases. Some of us can’t even imagine such an after exists. After we pass through the tunnel, and meet that light at the end of it, won’t there be another tunnel waiting? I have been told life is a moving, ceremonious thing. A reverent rite. An obscure concept I can barely grasp, becoming harder and harder to make out, like a tissue dissolving into smaller pieces under water, as I float away from holiness, away from a sense of being alive.
I am alone in the waiting room, stripped to goosebump skin in a hospital gown that never fits the way it’s supposed to. Since the surgery, my face has been constantly changing, a bloated, bruised moon, spinning on its own axis. It’s hard to meet people this way. To face the world with no idea of self anymore. What do I look like to them? Why does it matter? My eyes settle on the neon orange biohazard container hanging on the walls. A painting of a little village hangs next to it, an idyll I could escape into if I tried. But today, I am thinking of what it means to not run away, to not long for the after, to exist in this body, which may be sick; but a sick body can still be a good body. When I finally get lifted into the MRI machine, I pay attention to the way my body fits into the tunnel, my hipbones on the hard table, my arms strapped to my sides, the tightness of the headphones forced unto my ears. I don’t look for the light. In this moment all I can do is exist, while the knocking, twisting, and smashing begins. I shrink myself down into a nail, being hammered into an existence where I am small enough, where I don’t have to take up more space to be healthy. I close my eyes to imagine scenarios which will not make me want to leave my own body. But I am the cork of a bottle, being twisted around and around, nails caught on all my ridges, I am an ocean, smashing, flowing, drowning. I am an EKG, crashing, a fuse with its pressure building, a breath held in for far too long. The contrast glides up and down my body like I am a field of lava and it was always meant to come and destroy everything. I let myself think of what comes after.
When my life begins, I want to lose myself in ceremony and celebration. I want to dance, and swim, and look in the mirror and think, “that looks like me.” I want to carry my body with love the way it has carried me. When it is all over I imagine it will feel like I am touching the grass with my bare feet for the first time. I want to start living now. Even though I am unhealed. Even though I exist within the liminal space of a sick body. I want to take up all the space. I want to pay attention to the late summer rain as it trickles down my windows. The hummingbird’s fluttering wings that stir in the garden. Twirl and dance and smile when I feel like crying. Notice the sunshine so bright it can only be compared to magic. Treat my medications like an altar. Wash my hands so carefully, it’s as if I am cradling a child.
Kira Santana (she/her) currently lives on the island of O‘ahu, where she is a graduate student, poet, and hula dancer. Her work is deeply influenced by Hawaiian culture and its natural beauty, as well as her experiences with chronic illness, and her childhood growing up in Norway. Her poetry and essays have been published in magazines and journals, such as Collision Literary Magazine, the Mangrove Journal, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing, Allegory Ridge, and Anuenue Review, where she has served as poetry editor. Kristin received the 2019 Myrle Clark Award for Creative Writing, in 2022 she was given the Hemingway Award, and in 2020, she was honored for her work in Creative Writing at the University of Hawai‘i’s undergraduate showcase “English Represents!”