No Complaints

Sunshine and Shadow, Winslow Homer, 1872

SUNNY, CHANCE OF SCATTERED STORMS

O Memory of mine, if some trifling irritation should
happen to at any time arise and try to shape itself into
a shadow something like complaining… if, perhaps, my
pillow is too hard or soft or otherwise refuses to
cooperate with the odd shape of my head... or it
occurs to me to wonder, Did I forget to lock the door?
and I, grumbling, get out of bed and stumble twenty
feet to check — the door indeed is locked, and I am
cross about the wasted effort —

Remind me gently, Memory, about the day when I
believed I had nowhere to stay... and then about my
lying in the dark on cold faux marble tile in hostile
territory, as it seemed, behind a door marked “Detox
Intake”... about the racing heart, the inward violence,
despair thrashing crazily in a bottomless, vast lake of
peace that maddeningly would not swallow it —
serenity that would not yield....

And, Memory, allow me never to entirely forget the
brisk, efficient kindness of the human hands that
brought a blanket; tired eyes yet bright with hope that
read my vital signs; exhausted voices — gravelly with
having been pressed into shouting for ten-and-one
half-going-on-eleven brutal hours in a facility both
understaffed and overcrowded — that still could ask
with genuine compassion, Are you having thoughts of
suicide? Remind me, Memory, of that sudden and
eternal and surprising certainty: I didn’t want to die.

And then release me, Memory of mine, from history
back into life, the bliss that is this very minute, warm
and glorious with sunlight and the possibility,
however slight, of thunderstorms.