Winter Thoughts-Part II

As she lay dying in the comforts of a Serta, I sat on a wooden chair in my dorm room clad in jeans, a pink sweater, pink Converses and a black Bic pen held between clinched teeth. I watched as the reactions from the organic chemistry book blurred into a black swirl of winter thoughts and the death and dying pre-final, simply died on the desk. I saw a roach climb up beyond the rumpled blankets and sheets on the bed flush with the wall. I watched clearly as it crawled with persistence and determination towards the doorjamb of the bathroom door where it met another roach doing nothing but waiting from its perch for a connection.

Something snapped as the roaches collided antennas moving excitedly in heated bonded connections. Something deep inside me drowned in the winter thoughts of death's finality and that soon she would be dead and cold within my memories and within a wooden box. My heart broke yet again into millions of compartmentalized feelings and unspoken words and voices that tore jagged at my vocal cords plucking a synergy of want and longing in a world where I was disconnected without her. She was gone before she was gone. Her memories were lost in the transition into her next steps. Her breasts were eaten into open, oozing, seeping winter thoughts of life taken and yet her eyes and heart remained open to the healing that would surely come for the chosen.

It was early Sunday morning as I trampled through the snowdrifts towards nothingness. Sometime during the night, I had fled the confines of winter thoughts and headed north towards connections. I was headed to Massachusetts to my first college experience, to a connection and to the night where I was accosted in a grocery store by a man with a large, sharpened butcher knife who stood boldly before his audience of grocery shoppers including me and a few black friends and announced that he was going to kill him a "n****** tonight. I was mesmerized by the glean of the knife's edge and its intent. I was unimpressed by its holder and his intent.

The snow had already soaked through my pink Converses wetting my jeans up past my ankles. I didn't feel the frigid cold of the wind chill tearing through the pink knit of the sweater. I was coatless and oblivious to the winter snow and to my surroundings. I kept trudging through winter thoughts knowing that if I turned around, she would be dead sooner. If I kept moving forward, I would buy her and her Universe time to rethink the inevitable. I needed to suffer so that she would no longer have to.

Winter thoughts returned to the grocery store and the proclamation of life taken, mine. I paid for my limited snacks as my friends ran screaming from the store. The store clerks appeared paralytic in shock as ingrained movements of checking pushed my items past the scanner and robotic arms collected monies and bagged items. Their eyes were lifeless as their jobs went on beyond their collective consciousness and the man stood waving his knife, groceries packed in a cart waiting to kill him a "me."

The oppression of the South tore at my memories as my life in the Projects resurfaced the hideousness of scares already etched within my being and something snapped as a historical string of legacies stood me up proud and surrounded me with the buffaloes of my heritage and the drums of my life story. I walked deliberately in front of him as he waved the knife dangerously close to the slow heave of my chest and words emerged from my mouth and saved my life that night.
"I have been to the mountaintop of hell and witnessed the glory of a majestic heaven.
What you propose to do tonight is your hell and your journey. I will not walk away
from you and your intent. I will fight the good fight as your knife plunges deep into
the existing scars of my flesh and carves out the final breath of "her" life."

It was surreal moment for everyone in the store as each of us stood still waiting for his next move. I was caught in the final breath of "her" life, disconnected from my own. My breath was caught in the raising of his arm and the plunging of his intent. And then he stopped inches away from the curve of my heart and the arms of angels pulled me backward slowly, mechanically towards the open door of the store beyond the still profiles of the man and the workers.

They kept me walking through the ice on the sidewalks and the snow along the street edges until I reached the dorm and then they left me safe and ready to move onto another college experience. They brought me back to "her" and another college experience. Now she was dying and I was moving north, yet again, back beyond the store to the one person who had started my pre-med experience, "My Organic Chemistry teacher." She would help me understand oxidation and reduction reactions and how to use them to save her. She would know how to make my winter thoughts into summer hopes and keep my dying heart connection alive.

Winter Thoughts-Part I

We all have life experiences that pull us into the blizzard of our memories and exorcise our buried life stories from cellular databases of our mind. Winter thoughts are the memories that lay buried in the avalanche of past loses; thoughts closeted in the dark places of our existence; and thoughts that flurry as the driven snow along mountainsides of our subconscious minds.

I have a vivid memory of a winter thought that dredges through my repressed trapdoors and comes calling to my consciousness as the snow continues to fall today. She was dying slowing as the cancer tore rampant through her breasts collecting her life sources into coagulated breathes and chest heaves. Death was closer in the December of her last connection to a life that would be but a memory soon. Six months prior, she had chosen to let go and let the spirit of the Universe that she believed in deal with the cancer and its annihilation. She took to her proverbial bed and let faith begin the healing process. She was a believer in all things in heaven and the miracles she had witnessed in the backwoods of the African jungle and the life manifest in the Sahara desert. She was one of the chosen....chosen to die.

I was a young soon to be graduate of college sitting in the semi-dark confines of my dorm room watching the December snow fall in layers under a streetlight appearing benign from a second story watch place. One light on a desk pierced through the darkness of the room as I struggled to remain focused on my pre-med course finals and the theology "death and dying"final that would start the following Monday. It was a Saturday night when winter thoughts created their own momentum and a frenzy of her, death and dying, loss, heaven, darkness, scrambling of heart desires, embraces forevermore and the finality that I would never see her again.

She had been a consummate presence of nurture and support as I braved the uncertainty of the isolation and cruelty of a college experience, the hope of a future so daunting and maligned, the coldness of next steps, the want of a soul connection in a world, I was too young to understand and embrace. It was her presence that propelled me into an early graduation, an application to medical school, and a need to prove that despite my life circumstances, I could move beyond and soar. She was the Gibraltar of my rock. She created a sense of belonging and frankly, my presence on the planet amused her. But she was dying as I sat figuring out organic chemistry's oxidation and reduction reactions and the meaning of death and is there life beyond the flat line.

She was being reduced into the aftermath of life as her lifeline squiggled into the flatness of physical death. Her time was running out and so was mine. Our life lines intertwined into a ropelike cataclysmic reverberation of systolic and diastolic pressures and heartbeats as I sat in my dorm room and she lay dying in the center of her king sized bed.