If Walls Could Talk, They’d Wail

Ava scowled at the hospital green, stained ochre from presumably the passing through of many reticent souls and thought, “If these walls could talk, I wonder if people would seem redeemable in any way.”

We hope for those deathbed awakenings, a last ditch attempt and hope at enlightenment. Did dad ever truly accept his gay son after a lifetime of weary sighs and insults spit in his direction? Did grandma ever let go of her assumptions about “coloreds” after having a doting Jamaican nurse in her last days? Did any married spouse wish they’d been kinder in those trying years after 40 tired New Year celebrations on the same sloped sofa drinking the same numbing bubbles? Will anyone regret the hissing they did at people who made other choices? Or will they go in a delirium of nondescript sameness, their souls as encased in cataracts as their glaucoma ridden lenses. Do they rue the time they spent working the majority of every week, avoiding holiday bookings so their bosses might spray them with the temporary confetti of attention and favour, gone as quickly as the wind changes and a new recruit brings him the “coffee with the hazelnut shot” they know he likes before a meeting. ..?

Well, by all accounts, Ava’s ailing older sister regretted a couple things. It was clear she was upset that her credit cards had been maxed out on Amazon splurges before she learned that her bills would no longer be paid by her husband — and now the essentials for which she yearned were out of reach from her hospital bed. She most certainly regretted looking the other way when she’d seen her husband giddily smiling at his phone and glued to an apparent DM thread. She had wanted to know who held his attention, but was afraid to ask, as the tether between them seemed more like a hair trigger these days. It was the bosomy strawberry blonde from accounting, a fertile woman who knew exactly what to say when wives no longer did, to turn a head at precisely the moment a marriage became an untenable burden lifted by the sparkle of rare and new attention. She regretted the times she avoided his bed, essentially forcing him to look elsewhere for release. Maybe she regretted marrying at all. Now she was married to her cancer, and that wasn’t going all that well for her either.

Ava hadn’t bothered with regrets. There is nothing to regret if one never leaps into anything. Plus she took care of those in her small circle whose problems were always bigger than hers. It wasn’t a choice, was it? To place every ailing relative before herself seemed to be the only thing she had ever done or could have done. Well, when your days are spent hugging a wailing elder whose brain fog caused remarkable disorientation and upset, or spooning soup into the quivering mouth of the woman who had taught her to use a spoon as a baby — now too lacking in coordination to squeeze the wrinkles in rhythm with the cutlery most days. Mopping chins and emptying pee bottles or adult diapers kept Ava from wondering where her years had dissolved or to what they had amounted. Most of the time anyway.

This hospital visit seemed like a mouse turd on a string of pearly bedside stays. She could tell from her extensive experience witnessing the palliative withering of her previous wards that her sister was headed for that same confusing swamp. The water on her lungs wasn’t going anywhere. And so, neither would Ava. That is, until her sister drowned in pus and longing, not quite alone but not enveloped in the type of love she had imagined would be there for her during her end. Ava was prepared to soothe her sister as she hallucinated her way off this disappointing coil.

She wasn’t quite prepared for leaving this hospital bedside, with no one left to look after but her lonely self, no children or even a pet to snuggle at night. Ava’s days as an attractive pheromone amplifier were long over. She had invisible eyebrows, a pursed lip, a decidedly unworkable, permanently angry 11 entrenched indelibly on her mortal brow. The dusting of too many grays in her chestnut hair helped to read instantly as “spent grandma” type to any male who deigned to glance and assess. Perhaps her caretaking instinct should have, could have extended to her own self. Now she hoped for a giant glass cloche to curl up under the dome and just stay, encased and preserved for any curious passer by. “Please,” she ventured internally, “let my needs be met by having none henceforth.” It seemed the easiest way. One of the tenets she most remembered from Buddhism, that exotic set of rules from Eastern places she had romanticized growing up in staunch Christianity: “Desire is the root of suffering.” as in, “desiring what, and no more than, will be attained" assuages an otherwise most assured personal disaster.

Ava, in her heart of hearts, realized that she actually pined for the passion of desire. It had been a terribly long time since she actively wanted anything for herself. She had forgotten what a life stripped of obligation to service could hold: joy, sex, contentment, creation.

With no one to care for, she could leave this mint walled purgatory and pick up a giant canvas at the art store and start by rolling acrylic slime on her tits and plant her front onto the thing right on the floor. She might do it. She might just make a cabbage soup instead. With sausage this time, she had a pack on the shelf in the fridge all flaccid and ready for a quick fire up before being dropped into a roiling broth with caramelized edges. Maybe she’d finally get to that stack of fiction in her heavily dusted bookshelf. She could blow off the old, settled, dirty powder of an ancient home’s ducts, and let the zest of a new story and written words like vitamins flow into her eager, open, wanton mind. Her lungs were clear. Her legs could go fast from here, as fast as any legs could run with the fuel of a needed newness.

“Good bye sister, I hate this rotten mushy pea coloured wall, but I love the time we got. I hope your journey is sweet and light.”