Here, in this place where time refracts and sleep/wake cycles are no match for fluorescent lights and incessant telemetry alarms, you exist in a liminal space.
You are neither here nor there, clinically tenuous at best. Your stick-and-poke smiley face tattoos — the first things I noticed when I admitted you not long ago – are a foil to the reality of your situation. Decompensated cirrhosis. Multi-pressor shock. No loved ones at bedside.
Time is circular.
Or so you’d think if you listened to what my mother says, the various iterations of a conversation slipping through the cracks of her memory, reused and recycled ad infinitum.
Memory does not persist.
Instead, the allure of rebirth too enticing, it devours its own tail.
Tina Arkee
Nashville, Tennessee
*An Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of a snake or dragon eating its own tail.
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