June In January

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This Monday past, I got out of the hospital after a six-day stay. As 2021 entered, I was lying in a hospital bed with two IVs in my arm and a nest of wires connected to my chest. I was being told by a rotating stream of doctors that I needed to go back on dialysis. 

In October, while sleeping on the street, I became ill with some kind of respiratory infection that I still suspect was COVID-19. I tested negative for COVID at the hospital, but firstly, the COVID tests are now notoriously inaccurate, and secondly, enough time had passed that perhaps the infection was no longer active. To my surprise, the hospital told me they did not do COVID antibody tests (if the hospital doesn’t do it, who does?!?). 


Knowing that COVID resolves without treatment in over 99% of people under 65, and hearing on the news how overwhelmed hospitals were, I tried to weather the sickness. When my November disability check came, I was able to get a hotel room, where I spent nights awake in coughing fits, struggling to breathe. After Thanksgiving weekend, my money ran out and I had to face another ten days on the street. This was apparently too much for my body to take. My kidneys shut down. 


By the time I received my December disability check, I had gained as much as fifty pounds of water weight. My stomach and legs were swollen to such size that walking was difficult. And my breathing problems, which had improved in November, worsened again. I literally couldn’t walk twenty steps without getting out of breath. My heartbeat took on the irregular staccato rhythm of a jazz song. I felt like I’d aged decades in a few weeks. 


I continued to try to manage the illness myself, taking over-the-counter diuretics to try to shed the water weight, but they were not nearly strong enough. I began to feel many of the same symptoms I experienced during my initial kidney failure episode in 2012.  If I’d had more money, I might have stayed in my hotel room trying to fight the illness on my own and died. But my hotel money ran out on December 29 and feeling that no other options were left, I checked out of my hotel that day and, with labored breathing and barely able to walk, I went to the emergency room. 


While my hospital stay included some of the usual frustrations I have with the medical system, on the whole it was a reasonably good hospital experience. I will write about that in more detail in a future piece. After only about twenty-four hours being pumped full of blood pressure medication and strong diuretics, my kidneys seemed to kick back into gear and my symptoms abated. I was able to breathe again, my coughing fits stopped. I still was carrying an enormous amount of excess fluid, though I was slowly but surely eliminating it. At that point, it simply became a matter of not allowing the doctors to strong-arm me into dialysis. My stimulus check came through, alleviating my worry that I would be discharged to the street before I had recuperated sufficiently to survive it. 


As I lay in my hospital bed, just as had been the case during my initial kidney failure hospitalization in 2012, I found myself constantly thinking about the girl I call June. There were two reasons why. Being hospitalized with failing kidneys makes one contemplate their mortality and reflect on the people and events in their life. 


I was surprised back in 2012 that none of the people I called friends rushed to my bedside. But none surprised me more than June. I had always believed that our connection was such that if I was ever standing on the precipice of death, that no matter her life situation, she would be there for me, and that she would have things to say that had long gone unsaid between us. But it was a stark realization to find that no one I knew seemed affected by my near-death experience. 


So as I contemplated the possibility that I may be nearing the last days of my life, I returned to revisiting every pivotal event in my relationship with June, trying to piece together the truth I felt she’d never told me, and torturing myself with speculation as to how it all may have gone differently if I’d said or done different things.  There were so many moments with her that were like mile markers in my life where I wondered, “Did I say the wrong thing?” or “Did I do the wrong thing?” or did it never really matter what I said or did at all?


There was a second reason why these thoughts emerged, beyond the contemplation of my mortality. I realized that, after five years in prison and the three years of social isolation and finally homelessness that followed, my hospital nurses represented the first real interaction with girls that I’d had in almost eight years. Sure, I’d talked to women in passing in stores or at the beach. I’d had a few conversations here and there. But nothing approaching the level of spending half a day with the same girl coming to your bedside to check on you repeatedly, giving you medications and even emptying your urine from the bottles you’ve been asked to collect it in. Inevitably, with most nurses, a certain amount of personal conversation will transpire. 


This for me is like the ironic paradox of being hospitalized. Of course, everyone hates being in the hospital. But yet, there is a part of me that loves it because I get to be close to girls in a way that I don’t in everyday life.  And most of them are pretty cute!


The hospital where I was had twelve hour nursing shifts, 6am to 6pm and 6pm to 6am. On the morning of my next-to-last day, the night nurse whisked into my room with the new day shift nurse to introduce her to me. The new nurse’s name was Viktoriya. They wrote this oddly spelled name on the white board on the wall and were gone in a few seconds. I had been sleeping and wasn’t fully awake, but I remember feeling that there was something about Viktoriya that I liked and that already I couldn’t wait for her to come back. But she didn’t come back. For some reason, I ended up having a different nurse that day, and paranoid as I always am that people are mad at me, I wondered if Viktoriya had assumed I was going to be a mean patient and switched me out because I’d been too half-asleep to say hello to her. 


But the next day, Viktoriya was back. I hadn’t really seen her the first day. Having the chance to see her now, it could not escape my notice that she was different. Rather than the typical nurse scrubs, she was wearing what looked like a track suit, black with white piping. She was wearing a face mask of course, but accompanied by thick-rimmed wrap-around  glasses that were almost goggles, and a bright orange floral headscarf in the style that Black women often wear. She was wrapped up such that I couldn’t see her face at all.


After her interesting eccentric look, the next thing I noticed about Viktoriya was that she had the most amazingly beautiful voice. It was like music listening to her talk. I overheard her talking to a colleague in the hallway outside my room, and the sound of her voice transported me into another world. Suddenly, I’m sitting on the porch of an island beach house with a warm tropical breeze blowing on my face. 


Viktoriya returns to my room. As she was setting up the machine to take my blood pressure, I asked her, “Are you Russian?”. This seemed an obvious question given the spelling of her name. That, and a certain kind of cadence that is not an accent but is common to well-educated native Slavic language speakers who have become fluent in English. She said she was Russian and seemed surprised that I was smart enough to know that. My blood pressure was high, as it usually is in the morning before I take medication. I was tempted to tell her, “My blood pressure is so high because you’re so smoking hot!”. 


After that, I spent every moment waiting for Viktoriya to come back. She returned to give me my meds, and having apparently been told that I was refusing dialysis, decided to talk to me about it. She is standing over my bed pushing a syringe into my IV. The IV is in my right forearm and she is on the left side of the bed, so she is leaning over me, asking me why I won’t do dialysis. She says, “I don’t want to lecture you, but...”. In this phrase, I hear something in her voice that I hadn’t noticed before. Is that a little bit of New York City?  She’s Russian...a lot of Russian Jews in New York...could Viktoriya be a Russian Jewish girl?  That would just be too hot to handle!


A few minutes before, I had been thinking I was going to say to the next doctor who mentioned dialysis to me, “You could bring Bill Gates, Natalie Portman and Pope Francis in here to ask me to do dialysis and the answer is still no!”. But as I listened to Viktoriya, I feared that she could talk me into anything, even dialysis, if she talked long enough. Her voice!  OMG, her VOICE!


As I notice the hint of a New York Jewish girl accent in her voice, I take note of something else. Viktoriya is the exact same size and body shape that Scarlett Johansson was in real life. Her face is all wrapped up. I study her and ask myself, could Scarlett be bold enough and bored enough...Nah, she wouldn’t dare!  And Scarlett’s voice is different...deeper and generally accent-free. And she couldn’t get away with this. 


Viktoriya is not Scarlett...I don’t think. But she’s sooo cute!! She says, “I like your blanket.”. Feeling the need to explain why I was using my personal blanket on top of the three hospital blankets I already had, I said, “I get so cold.”. After a moment of silence, she says, “Me too.”. I think, “Well, let’s get married and be warm together!”.  But of course I don’t say it. 


I know, I know. I’ve dedicated so much of this blog to the idea that I want to marry Scarlett Johansson, and I do. But Scarlett’s about to marry someone else apparently, and it would not be my strategy to stay lonely and wait for Scarlett forever while other girls that I like pass me by. It’s kind of like one of those television game shows: Do you want to go forward waiting for Scarlett Johansson, or take Viktoriya and go home now? Bob, I’ll take Viktoriya!


She leaves the room, and I throw my head back against my pillow in giddy ecstasy, the sound of her beautiful voice echoing in my head. I imagine what it would be like for that voice to be the first sound I hear in the morning, the last sound I hear at night. June had a voice that affected me the same way. I haven’t felt this feeling in years, almost a decade. The next time she comes back, I am still giggling. She laughs too. We do not discuss what we’re laughing about. It seems so obvious what’s happening but yet...stay tuned. 


When she returns next, Viktoriya tells me that I am going to be discharged. I had been hoping for another day or two as I would have liked to be able to shed a little more of the excess fluid I was carrying, but I understood given the crisis of the moment that there were likely people far sicker than me who needed that bed.  She leaves so I can get dressed. When she returns, she compliments me on my scarlett blue Ralph Lauren dress shirt. I feel insecure because, bloated as I am, I’m stuffed into it like a sausage. 


This is just one iteration of my general insecurity. It SEEMS like Viktoriya likes me, but how could she?  I’m in a disgusting state of failing health. She had heard me talking with doctors about the fact that I’m homeless. She must just be being nice to me because that’s her job, and no doubt she has a boyfriend with nice abs, healthy kidneys, a home, a job, and a family. There’s no way she could be a girl who actually doesn’t care about all that and looks deeper. There’s no way she’s a girl who actually sees ME. There’s no such thing!


I follow her as she walks me to the front door of the hospital. On the way, she silently looks at me a few times in such a way that I would normally interpret as an invitation to say something. But I don’t. At the door we literally wave goodbye to each other. My mind is now elsewhere as all my effort is dedicated to not letting her see that I’m exhausted from the short walk and it is taking all of my mental and physical energy simply to remain upright. I walk out the door, and just like with Scarlett, I don’t look back. 


I had chosen this hospital in part because it is right across the street from a trolley stop. I struggle to walk the fifty yards or so to the train platform, feeling faint. An hour or so later, I make it to my hotel room. Every moment, I can’t stop thinking about Viktoriya. 


And that is where it all comes back to June. That night, I had a dream about June. I don’t dream of her often, but yet when I do, the emotions I feel in those dreams are some of the most powerful I’ve felt in life. More real than real. In the dream, June and I have a heated argument, something we never really had in real life. It culminates with me getting angry in a way that I never do in reality. I yell at her, “You’ve given me a whole lot of nothing!” and throw a cup across the room. She then actually gets upset too, and vociferously defends herself, something she never seemed to feel it was necessary to do in real life. 


One of the strongest enduring effects of my relationship with June, and many other girls, is that I no longer have any trust of my perception that a girl seems interested. So many times in my life, I’ve felt certain that a girl had feelings for me, or attraction to me, only to have her deny it, leaving me embarrassed and humiliated. How could I feel so strongly about a girl, feel so inextricably connected to her, but she doesn’t feel it?!? So I’ve come to hold the view that any girl who really likes me will, on her own initiative, take undeniable affirmative action to make something happen. Hence, “the rule” of not making advances toward girls that I wrote about here a few months ago. 


But I also worry that the prominence June has played in my life will be off-putting to other girls. Would they perceive June as a ghost of my past that they could never compete with?  While this might be a legitimate concern for girls like my former girlfriend that I didn’t like enough and never should have been with, it should be of zero concern to girls like Viktoriya...or Scarlett. While my memories of June will always constitute an important part of who I am, what I would feel for a girl who I really loved who actually loved me back in equal measure would overshadow the conflicted bittersweet emotions associated with June by a million-fold. 


I still think about breaking “the rule” for Viktoriya, sending her a note, maybe even sending flowers as cliche and passe as that is. Maybe I still will, but my greater hope is that I won’t have to. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Viktoriya that I liked her. So I’m telling the universe I guess, and hoping that perhaps if it is meant to be, she’ll hear. That’s why I write about girls here. As a writer, I think there is a part of me that would want this to be the way it happens. 


It’s Sunday, January 10, 2021, and that’s about as far away from June as it is possible to be.



Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern


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