Each morning, I gaze at her cradling her head in the crooks of the couch, limbs splayed out in luxurious comfort. I watch her rub her neck against anything sturdy enough to take the abuse, and I admire how she scales the furniture and the walls to torture little moths and grasshoppers. She laps up water and crunches up her kitty chow, lovingly provided by these human hands each morning. Her life is so simple.
She’s my only friend. And I often wonder what it would be like to trade places with Poppy.
When I was studying for my first licensing exam during medical school, I remember a similar sort of feeling. It was an all-consuming process. My eyes were in a constant state of numbness, anesthetized by the glowing haze of endless multiple-choice questions on a computer screen. Periodically, I’d get paper cuts from leafing through First Aid, the medical student’s Bible of “high-yield” information likely to show up on the exam, and the fleeting pain would wake me from my studious stupor and remind me what it felt like to be alive again. Glancing outside the second-floor kitchen window, I’d see squirrels scurrying between the branches of a grand maple tree, their bushy tails tracing perfect little arcs, taunting me with their freedom.
How I envied those squirrels.
Whenever I found myself imagining the Freaky Friday version of me and nature’s tiny creatures, I’d decide it was time for a break. But guilt would overwhelm me as I’d lace up my running shoes to head outside into the summer heat. Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to bring along my mp3 player and try to passively absorb the lectures of Dr. Goljan, a famous pathologist who had trained many a med student to pass the boards. As fate would have it, I only ended up retaining his lewd jokes. Ask me how to keep straight all the different hematological disorders whose abbreviations end with “L”—CML, AML, CLL, ALL, etc.—and no can do, but if you’d like me to provide a detailed rendition of the time Dr. Goljan ran a marathon and pooped on a sapling in someone’s front yard, that’s well within the realm of my capabilities. (I’m going to be a great doctor.)
Now, years later, I am holing myself up in a social science archive on a daily basis, sifting through volumes of the mundane and the captivating thoughts scholars have had over the last fifty years about health care reform in Guatemala. It’s a different kind of consumptive process. It’s the anticlimactic ending to a long stretch of travel here in the “land of eternal spring,” during which I’ve been collecting people’s stories and watching life and death unfold on a regular basis. How does it feel to be a poor indigenous woman dying of cancer? Where do you look for help when there is none? And what drives people to look for care when they are pretty sure that all of the grains of hope have fallen into the bottom half of the hourglass? These are the questions I sought to answer, and empathizing with the sick and the dying took its toll on me.
I retreated to the library.
My life here is relatively cushy. I’m in a tourist town where I don’t tower over the locals as I do in the countryside, but rather, my stature makes me all the more anonymous. I have potable water, a large bed, and nighttime silence. These things ought to help me recuperate from months of physical and emotional exhaustion from acting as a container, rather than a conduit, for the words of the suffering.
But there is something ultimately draining about the rigmarole of self-care and the yellowing pages of a repetitive history. My only task is to read books all day, to relate them to the answers I thought I found, yet this merely leads me down other lines of inquiry until there is an overwhelming amount of text and self-questioning. As I ravel and unravel my thoughts, I find myself craving home—the conveniences of the United States or the inconveniences of rural life, but not this.
This is certainly a different type of voluntary drowning from preparing for the boards, but it is a voluntary drowning, nonetheless.
Every morning, I wake up and pour boiling water on top of a half-cup of oatmeal. And I watch Poppy the cat, and I think to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to access her simplicity of being, and not thinking so much?
