Daily writing prompt: Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life

(May 21 2024)

I am in an overlit operating room. My wife is on the table before me, partially enshrouded with a baby blue paper wall. A faceless team of hospital people – some surgeons, some nurses, and some Newschannel 5? I am lost. She has been in active labor for 24 hours and finally, now, the conclusion to the madness of having a child is minutes away from it’s next waypoint. At the foot of the OR table is a tall, skinny, obelisk-shaped thingamajig containing clear acrylic pouches. To my observation stainless steel implements and confusion were the only two categories that outnumbered the murmuring hospital staff.

In the outside world, friends and coworkers began believing that I had forgotten to send them the happy announcement that our child had arrived. There anticipation was only eclipsed by my desire to leave that hospital and take my family home. But I couldn’t.

Eventually, the surgeon’s blood-soaked hands reached an elevation high enough for me to see that they were making progress with the C-section. Then, as I am studying the face of my heavily sedated wife, the head surgeon confirms, “Dad, are you announcing the gender?”

I reply, “yes.” Mere seconds later a bloody infant’s genital is thrust in my face, and I nearly botch the announcement by shouting, “IT’S A B–. IT’S A GIRL!!!” Subsequent to the near embarrassment, a nurse receives my daughter from the head surgeon, and hurries her over to the warmer.

As I look down between hasty swipes of towels, and nurses hands, I am overwhelmed with emotion. I cant be happy, peaceful, nor am I able to cry, it’s a logjam in my brain. My little girl is hysterical. Studying her face, a lump forms in my throat. I was just noticing the vibrato her tongue was producing as the nurse said, “Okay, dad you can touch your daughter.”

…

Nervously, I reached down with one of my hands and palmed her entire torso. I uttered a clumsy greeting, and I saw her attention immediately arrest, as she tried to open her eyes for the first time. She was trying to see me. Why would anybody want to see me? That memory messes me up. I had left friends, clan, and familiarity. Out of that whirlwind of sterilization and chaos, when my hand touched her chest, she told me, “You no longer have to wander. You belong to me and I belong to you.” My hands had passed from persecutor to father, violent to lover, killer to kindred.

(2004…)

Really, we’re going here?

Yes. Shutup and write it.

Rewind the tape to 2004. The name I am called by is Zachary. We’re now looking at a version of him that was never intended to be. His name is Zachary, but his name is also desolation. At random times in the middle of his high-school he cries hysterically. Whoever happens to be present comforts him, but those comforts do nothing to quell the tailspin he is in.

Grandpa died and with him, his doctrine of ‘Once a gentleman, always a gentleman.’ His peers are solidifying plans for their promising futures. All around him healthy people are doing healthy things, and he cant figure out how he got this sick. There’s a blackness consuming him from the inside. It is slowly adding dolor to the abundant smile he was always able to flash in an instant. There is nothing more inconvenient than at eighteen, the climax of life, hitting life’s lowest trough.

The wind is cold and the floodlights are bright. Standing in the middle of the varsity soccer field at Parkway South’s stadium, the varsity men’s soccer team is being presented on Senior Night. This is the last home game we will ever play at Parkway South. Vaguely I feel the gravity of this moment. Mostly I am consumed by the austerity of the climate and moment. What leaves me feeling colder than my teammates is not the shorts, or that I had the least amount of playing time in the game. It’s the realization that Dr. Mazzola, the father of my teammate and head principal of the high-school, is acting as my stand-in dad. Change, in its abrupt manner was inveigling it’s way into every line of my life’s narrative.

Unbeknownst to me she was there. After we stepped off the field and picked up our duffels, we see friendly supporters standing at the edge of the track waiting to present the players with their own customized posters. How I missed her, I’ll never know. I mean I remember seeing her and sharing some pleasantries, but beyond that, the moment seemed unremarkable. I was already too numb to feel, too numb to notice. That day came to an ignoble end, and what followed was the terrifying future.

Just now I am struggling to write this because I find so much of that time superfluous. That time period was like my Dark Age. There were no hopeful prospects for the future. Dullness and uncertainty ratified new depressions each day. My heart felt no way forward. Oddly, forward was the only way out. Forward is a daunting proposition if you had to face what I did.

The circulations of each day came and went. Assignments were falsified, grades came before my eyes to notify me again of the effort I couldnt muster, and the vanity of my external self was lying more than ever. Underneath I was sliding. Little pieces of my humanity were being chipped away. Jovial Zachary became edgy. Edgy Zachary became the norm, evicting the familiar remnants of my personality. I suppose the onset of this dark backdrop makes her sudden appearance in my life all the more luminous.

Allison, the girl bearing my custom poster on Senior Night, began popping up everywhere. We had attended the same schools for the last six years without running into each other. Even to my weary mind these chance encounters began suggesting that something was up. When she saw me, she would invite me to a council where good students came together to contemplate improvements for the school district. The sort of thing that was exactly what I would design if I wanted to torture myself. If you havent figured it out already, I went.

I dont believe in Cupid, nor am I privy to the machinations of love. What happened to me in that first council meeting though, left me divided against myself. “You like her!” Only for my vain, external self to reply, “What!? No I dont!” The reasonable part of my psyche won out against the liar. I liked her. I was trapped. By unknown forces I was clapped into a rollercoaster, and subjected to a course whose route I did not trust in. Bruh…

In all honesty I loved her from the very beginning. Life had me in a whirlwind. Much of it was out of my control. So those first few months between us was riddled with anxiety for me. I didnt want to lose her. Between phone calls, or outings she was the only one I could think about. Recalling these memories fills my eyes with fresh tears. This is the first time I have gone back to relive that season from 21 years ago. Because I had lost loved ones, and was actively losing more, my mind put a strangle hold on our relationship. It didnt matter though.

Vacated acreage from the lost chips of my humanity permitted entry to a dark force. When I believed something stable was happening to me in the midst of the consuming trials, I learned I had made my greatest miscalculation. I was sick. I was sick and I couldnt protect Allison from it. I thought I could love. I believed I was ready for a relationship. If mom left and I had been through all that, I thought my repayment came in the form of being with Allison. I wanted her more than grass wants it’s green pigment. I yearned for that one thing that was giving me life.

And I couldnt have it.

What happens when your lush forests of health and prosperity become deserts and the deserts collapse? The sparseness becomes an echo chamber. Then the echo chamber converts your belief to the other one. Eventually, you break. Because it’s biology or psychology, or whatever. It’s a reality you want to ignore. When you try to ignore that singular voice welcoming your destruction, the voice hires three others. If you’re able to resist the quartet, the quartet joins itself to a symphony. Withering notes wipe every piece of self-knowledge away. When the blonde hair and hazel eyes are no longer apparent- when you’re left as a post in the wilderness, finally, the silence unfurls around you like a final home. You ask yourself, “Is this it?”

Defying everyone’s counsel in her life, she never left me. In her unapproachable light, she stayed there with me, while I was darkness personified. She told me, “No matter how long it takes for you to get better, I will wait for you.” I knew that meant an entire lifetime. Even though she went off to college, she didnt run off with some pre-law jock from Mizzou. She stayed loyal to the broken, prospect-less, son of a mechanic. She gave me hope and introduced me to the nature of God.

(May 12 2024)

My hands went from causing pain to being the only hands in the operating room able to settle my daughter. Without Allison this page would be blank, and the subject of my social security number nonexistent. Oh yea, and she supported my writing all those years ago even though I’ve done my best to silence myself.