Eireann Corrigan: Privileges (for Christina)

If you are gaining weight at the acceptable pace,
(which is two and a half to three pounds a week)
and you have graduated from tubes and have no clumsy
IV to dance partner alongside you- As long as doctor
has not secured you with restraints on bed rest,
then you can sign out at the nurses' station to the
pediatric unit's toy room to play video games. It smells
like the floor where people hook their kidneys
to machines and because we are not innocently
sick, those nurses give us severe looks before bustling
back into the rooms of the blameless leukemia patients. But
they have Donkey Kong and Burger Time and also
that unlatched window that leads directly out
to the hospital roof. Bingo. Freebird. You watch
the door while I swing over one leg at a time, then
stand in front of the view, all the cars in the lot that can drive
home. I'll yank you through the window but don't forget
to turn back, prop it open with a cheap doll torso
on the sill so we can get back inside. Sayonara psychiatric
ward, farewell to Nurse Betsy, who believes that everyone
pacing the hallway is trying to burn off breakfast. Out here,
we run laps across the speckled asphalt until our sides stitch
with pain. Then we do sit-ups, counting aloud to the night.
There are soft patches of tar to stick a penny for each month
we've been inside. and when we race, your gown tied
in the back billowing forward and your gown tied in the front
billows back and you look like a bride or some shepherdess-lost
in all her robes. Soon you'll get nervous and say it's time
to go inside. But let's crouch together for a few more minutes
and relish that good shiver, let our teeth clatter and show off
our narrow shoulders to that wide and hulking sky. Tomorrow
on those long sofas of group therapy, we'll both claim
we want to die. But we'll mean:please someone convince us
to stick around. Remind us over and over that we deserve
to drink even the milk left over in the cereal bowl, to sop up
what's left on our plates with bread. Because last night, we stood
on top of fourteen floors of suffering-from the maternity
to the morgue. Hundreds of beds buckling beneath the weight
of legitimate illness, thousands of plastic sacks of donated blood-
We stood above all of it and did not leap. Neither of us even dangled
from the grainy ledge or balanced one foot on the parapet.
Let's be honest here-we've hardly approached any edges at all.