Paddy Wagon

Our walk-up hovers within a stone's throw of the ER's main entrance - and of our venerable Psych Ward.

I've been taken to both, dozens of times. The sirens, though, don't keep me up at night. I sleep well, and I sleep easy, in my personal post-apocalypse.

Some days the paramedics scream past the windows of our living room every sixteen minutes, for hours on end. This is not a popular hospital, but it's busy by necessity. So many are so sick.

I have a prized memory, not of an ambulance, but of a paddy wagon acting as an ambulance. I'm lying in its sterile hold, in a pool of my blood, handcuffed, on the cross-hatched metal floor. I am barely thinking anything, but what I am thinking, with terrible clarity, is that this is precisely where I belong. Where I have always belonged, since I was a twinkle in Dad's eye.

That darkness informs the radiance of my current condition. In this world, gratitude is the first function of polarity.