20- Rejection towards doctors

After wiping my cheeks and rubbing my eyes several times, I entered the emergency room again. My grandfather had woken up. He was lying in bed, covered with Virginia's blanket. He was playing with Leslie's hand, patting it, and staring absentmindedly at the ceiling. I greeted him, and he squeezed my nose when I kissed his cheek. I looked down and saw that his bag was still filling with blood. I grabbed my purse to go out and smoke a cigarette. Avoiding the judgmental looks from my family due to my tobacco addiction, I sprayed perfume on my sweater. "It smells like chocolate," my grandfather said. I gave him one of "my pretty girl smiles," as he used to call them, and left the emergency room.

Maybe it's just rambling, but at night hospitals are very similar to terminal parking lots. There are always people talking animatedly outside: the night shift nurses who go out for coffee and chat with the cleaning staff. And the doctors who dress up as if they were important and get out of their fancy cars to walk to the kiosk to buy something, whom you can't hold eye contact with for too long without your eyes burning from so much arrogance. Not all of them are like that, but the ones I know are. People are in a hurry and nervous, on the verge of tears thinking about the impending farewell. And some appear absent and calm, wishing for everything to end and finally arrive home.

I will never understand my rejection towards doctors, even though as a veterinarian you could say I am their distant cousin, yet they are the part of my professional family tree that I like to prune before calling them colleagues. When I was little, I wanted to be a dermatologist. I would caress my skin and always get excited about getting bitten by a mosquito or getting a rash from the dust hidden meticulously in my dolls' dresses. I never knew on which exact day I decided to become a veterinarian. I remember that when I was five years old, my grandfather would always take me to the bank wearing a yellow dress that my mother had given me, it was my bank dress. I would feed the pigeons in Bolivar Square and jump near them, trying not to scare them away. I didn't want them to fear me, but they always flew away. Something similar would happen to me with women years later when I discovered I was a woman. I would feed them, open my legs for them, and give them my whole being, hoping they wouldn't fly away, just looking them in the eyes and getting closer to them very slowly, still feeling the palpitations of my nervous and fearful heart in their presence. I was a cursed girl, I don't know why, but I could never fly or make the pigeons stay by my side. With cats, it was the opposite, they would come to me and dance around me with their tails. I would fall in love with the velvety touch of their fur, but I never dared to pick them up, I distrusted them so much without knowing that I also had a feline soul. I would discover this years later when I stayed with my back turned to the person I loved in bed, not daring to leave, waiting very still for their arms to wrap around my body, like a cat. With dogs, on the other hand, I always had a wonderful relationship, which would leave me forever broken when my first dog, Punky, died of a heart attack at the vet's. When I saw him convulsing and my mother covered my eyes and told me to leave the office, I understood what I wanted to do when I grew up. To be the woman who stayed inside the office, taking care of Punky so he wouldn't die from a heart attack. And so it was. I have never had a dog die on me, not even that fourteen-year-old St. Bernard who had an intestinal obstruction. A respected professor and colleague refused to perform the surgery because he was too old to withstand anesthesia. But Boby came out of my surgery excellent, and the last time I was in New Orleans, his father took him to the same dog shelter where I used to volunteer for a couple of hours in the afternoons. I remember once telling Patrick that she should read Stephen King's Pet Sematary, which was my favorite book by the author. Something she probably never did and took lightly. Like any request that I considered important but was just chewed up gum that would soon become tasteless. Naturally, I never reproached her for those dismissals, I hated becoming a nagging girlfriend, so that's why I dedicated myself to writing. Writing all the tasteless gum that wouldn't pass her tongue.

I smoked a Marlboro Light as I looked at the hospital's exterior. It was a full moon that night, my favorite has always been the waning moon, split in half as if it had been pierced by a cold and lacerating ray. A torn moon without its other half. If it weren't for the moon, I would never have come to Earth. My sign was Cancer, ruled by the moon; and Patrick's sign was Taurus, ruled by Venus. Every 300 years, Venus and the moon align and revive two fallen stars, or something like that I seemed to read somewhere, or hear someone say once. The full moon is exactly the same as that feeling of dancing barefoot in the rain, knowing that no one will see you or be with you when you return home with wet clothes and cold nipples. You enjoy the rain in absolute complicity with yourself, with the timeless knowledge of not sharing that moment with anyone else. It was seeing the moon and being filled with that loneliness that disappeared with my skin covered in the shimmer of the night. I have always wondered if anyone thinks of me when they observe the moon because for some unknown reason, I feel like I am part of it. I smiled sadly thinking of Patrick. Surely she would be looking at it tonight, even if she didn't think of me. I shrugged and walked through the hospital parking lot until I sat on a cement wall that bordered one of the side sidewalks. A few meters to my right, there was a group of nurses chatting, smoking, and drinking coffee. I felt the nurses' eyes on me, but I ignored them. I lowered my head with the wind rustling my hair, yawned, covered my mouth, and remained still, sitting in a thoughtful air, immersed in the course my family life had taken in the recent hours.