Founded in the fall of 1991, Laurel Moon is Brandeis' oldest, national literary publication. Each issue we publish features original work from undergraduate students.
are you okay?
You left to get food and did not return. (You had a rehearsal; I have not memorized your schedule yet.)
***
The next time I walked with you, my footsteps sank into yours in inches of snow. When we were almost there you turned around “to check if I am still there.” I couldn’t see you; snowflakes were rushing into my eyes.
***
“You need to get medicated.” You said after I checked multiple times to ensure that my roommate is still breathing after they went to bed early. “No one can survive this level of anxiety.”
Survival is an interesting word. A human brain is expansive and extremely adaptable to survival. I get used to listening to my irregular heartbeats, to trying a bit harder to breathe, to the meteoroid in my chest. Most times I don’t realize that I am struggling to breathe until I am almost out of oxygen.
***
I sit in the library surrounded by books and silence. I read about how trans people are more likely to experience a [deadly] chronic illness or disability.
***
It’s a quiet morning (well, past noon) and we are both folding origami on the table. You taught me how to fold a penguin and told me how your 4th grade teacher was obsessed with origami. We let our penguins be gay together. I keep feeling like something terrible is about to happen. I don’t say it.
***
Sometimes (oftentimes) I hate how my love manifests.
***
Are you okay?
r u okay? u okay?
Are u okay??
how are you feeling?
Are you okay?
do you need anything?
***
In the library booth, I keep getting flashbacks of you dying. I call them flashbacks even though they didn’t happen, nor are they likely to. I get images of you leaning on the bookshelf in your room | heading falling to the left | legs spreading out | unconscious. The cat keeps trying to climb on you. I text Y. to check if you are alive home. You text me a few minutes after. I delete the message to Y.
***
On the way to the airport the sun was so bright that it swallowed me whole. You tilted your seat backwards and closed your eyes, at an angle that I could see you from the rearview mirror, your pained expression and glimmers of sun on your forehead. You grunted about the sun being in your eyes. I wanted to tell you please don’t get hurt or please don’t feel hurt or please don’t hurt, or maybe that you have been hurting in my dreams, too, you know.
***
For someone who doesn’t believe in god, I have prayed an awful amount of time.
***
They didn’t let me go in the ambulance with you.
***
I sit in my car, shivering, processing. I know my love is not enough to keep you safe.
***
In the emergency room, I sit in a cubicle next to a lamented white paper that says six feet apart and overhear conversations at the registrar. Everyone is here to visit a loved one. A husband, wife, mother, daughter. Do you know where their room is? Yes. Yes, I do.
When I fill out a visiting form, I won’t know what to put next to relationship: “I love you” would not be a sufficient answer.
***
I know my need for control is hurting you sometimes, but in (front of) an institution that chains our care, I couldn’t help it. Next time when they say only family is allowed in the emergency room, maybe I will finally muster the courage to say, Look at me. Stare into the eyes of a freak. I have no family besides who I love here.
***
Is the patient experiencing an excess amount of paranoia?
Is the patient delusional?
Has the patient experienced a life-altering trauma in the past?
Has the patient been diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)?
Is it really paranoia if all the things that you are worried about could happen?
***
Last night, I fell asleep on the couch while you turned off all the lights in the living room and worked on your laptop in the dark. Last night was the only time in a long while that I did not have a nightmare, that I was not afraid of falling asleep. This morning, I did not wake up heavy-chested, gasping for air.
***
Lately, the only place that I could sleep on was the couch. I put my legs on the armrests and my head butting on your thighs. You rest your left hand on my arms sporadically, an assurance that you’re still here. You are studying for your psych class that you’re maybe failing. Others are sitting on the living room rug or eating strawberry cake at the table. Their laughter leaks into my sleep. Sometimes I murmur your name[s], and the living room will be quiet for a beat.
Or, I lay a pillow on the white rug and snuggle it and you put a blanket on me. Your steps circle around me because our living room is very small and there is no way of ignoring a sleeping body.
***
You know a lot of things that are wrong with your body, but not all of them. You make long phone calls for referrals, and finally, the long waitlists. Some weeks that is all you can do.
***
I am not pretending to be asleep. It is just that every time I fall asleep alone, somebody dies, or is dying. All of my dreams are soaked in t(f)ears, like when you’re driving alone on a foggy Midwestern night and you smell something, but you don’t know what it is or where it comes from.
***
At the beginning of the pandemic, your medical care provider said that you are on the list of people they refuse to admit. They said, you will get sick anyways.
***
Too often I am only capable of loving through cat pictures, saved poems from Twitter, and are you okay?s. Through quiet Midwestern rides to the hospitals and airports. I attempted to explain this type of love to someone else, and they called it “aggressive care.” I know part of loving you is taking care of myself. I promise I am trying.
***
We sit on adjacent couches and combat the world. I say this is good practice for the future: being alive and breathing and building a life and bringing up children.
***
It takes a village to raise a child, by which I mean it takes a village to raise ourselves too, those hurts and wounds and trauma from existing in a world way too cruel.
Oh, but don’t forget the joy. They always forget the joy.
***
You and I talk about revolutionary optimism: always believing that a better world is possible, despite, despite, despite. I dream of a future where you do not have to go through barriers and barriers of humiliation to access the care you need. I dream of a future where health is not a luxury. I dream of a future where we don’t have to worry about the economy and survival. I dream of a future where you stop dying. Please stop dying.
***
And by please stop dying, I mean please stop killing us.
***
In his poem “Meditations in an Emergency,” Cameron Awkward-Rich says “we were raised in the institution of dreaming.”
Sometimes (oftentimes) I dream about the future so hard it physically hurts.
***
I know many some of us don’t make it out alive.
***
This is how I survive. This is how we survive.
Ocean Wei is a trans writer and a senior at Kenyon College. His works are in or forthcoming in Brevity, The B'K, en*gendered lit, and more.