The last thing they took out of me was the Hickman line: a tube that had been tunneled under my skin through my collarbone, embedding itself within the superior vena cava in the right atrium of my heart.
After tearing the labyrinthine-like line from my chest, they announced that I had been discharged. A few hours later I was limping towards my parents’ rental car and a fragmented future.
I have tried endlessly to make sense of being defined as normal after almost dying, of being expected to ‘return’ to some kind of objective reality after months of living in a hospital.
It’s like visiting a foreign country. There lies a moment of suspension as you try to make sense of the world as it presents itself to you. You are an observer, witnessing the cogs of the machine but not contributing to its function. You sit in a cafe and order a coffee just like everybody else, but you are only a temporary fixture, whereas the others move through this world daily. To everyone else this cafe, this city, is real, fluid, and consistent, but for you, it will forever remain confused and alien.
Being sick for so long and being so close to death for such a prolonged period of time was like being asked to live and exist in a land that is not my own. You are detached and unsettled in a world that others view as normal. You are part of this world but not of it.
The art of return is to continue embodying that moment of suspension and of dissonance.
