Two-Cup Day
When Rest and Restlessness Collide
Sometimes, it’s a two-tea-bag kind of day. I sit on my bed watching season 4 of Sweet Magnolias on Netflix. It’s Spring Break here in Chicago, and a brisk 44 degrees. For a moment I feel guilty for sitting around watching television after years of being too sick to leave the apartment except for physical therapy, neurology visits, or the occassional hospital stay when my body needed more than a cup of tea or my beloved cats Brindy and Athena sitting beside me as my oxygen machine eased the burden of breathing in a beautiful day like today. Today, my guilt takes over, though my mother tells me I’ve earned the right to rest when I can because I want to do everything at once.
What if it’s all gone again tomorrow?
I decide to go for a walk. I catch a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror. I’m 44, though my students tell me I look mid-thirties with my glasses on. I finish my first cup.
I take off my glasses and look in the mirror, and I look mid-fifties. I tried contacts this summer, and poof, I'm ten years older. My students listen to me during our teacher lunch days, when we abandon academics and talk about all things fun. It’s a nice break for all of us to sit and be human. I tell them it takes a lot of charcoal masks and aloe vera cream to maintain the mid-thirties look. They point out my grays, and I remind them that’s partly their fault, so we crack up.
I head to the park near my house with the little pond and the geese swimming behind their mother. My playlist shuffles and Brandi Carlile's " The Story filters through my earbuds with each stride. My left leg buckles. It’s just a conduction block; no need to signal the neurologist just yet. I hold my quad in place as I walk. I don’t care who stares anymore.
“All of these lines across my face / tell you the story of who I am,” breezes in from Brandi.
I make up my own lyrics. Chronic illness makes up its own rules. I can make up my own song. I’ve earned these lines.
A smile from the first kiss with my fiancé.
A smile, the first time we danced in a dimly lit bar after hours.
The tears that filled me when the lights came up and the dancing stopped.
I wasn’t always a teacher. I wasn’t always a patient. I was just Jonathan.
The smiles from the first time I helped a student turned friend transfer from bed to his wheelchair made me know I was meant to help those in need.
The smile as he laughed when I squirted whipped cream in his mouth to chase his hot chocolate.
I started to become Mr. Jonathan at that point.
I laughed when I stumbled in a grocery store and my mom asked me if I was drunk.
The forced smile as the technician placed the cage over my head for my first MRI.
The frown when my doctor told me they saw something.
The doctor called me Mr. Saucedo.
The tears I held back at my first IVIg infusion, and the pain was so bad I didn’t know what to do.
I was a patient.
The smile when I stood up, gait belted, and supported by my physical therapist, as I began to learn to walk again.
I was somewhere in-between Jonathan, Mr. Jonathan, Mr. Saucedo, and a patient.
I’m my own season now. I earned these lines. Still, sometimes it feels like a two-cup-of-tea kind of day when years of laughing and crying collide for no reason other than realizing time is not my own. It belongs to a force greater than me. I am simply loaned out for the spring, waiting to be returned in winter. I don’t yet know for sure how long spring will last, but that’s okay. Uncertainty collides with my desire to rest and to do it all. All at once. And so I turn on the next episode of Sweet Magnolias and clutch my second cup with my cat beside me.
It’s a two-cup day.
