I know It’s Serious
BY Sandra Alland
The girl with the boyfriend out of a coma had gotten used to sacrifice. She redesigned her life based on the fact that she had a boyfriend in a coma, then adjusted when he woke up not being able to speak or walk or tell the difference between shaving cream and whipped cream. She got up early every day and spent an hour at her boyfriend’s bedside before work. She brought him coffee and muffins and talked about the things she’d seen and read.
At first he didn’t understand, but little by little his speech returned. Then the girl edited some of her stories, especially the one about marching topless on Church Street. Now she was editing her apartment, she thought, as her favourite dildo fell from her hands into the trash.
The girl with the boyfriend out of a coma had spent evenings and weekends at the hospital until well past visiting hours. They sometimes watched movies or once in a while one of the boyfriend’s friends from before the coma would show up. The friend would avoid looking at him, instead gazing with pity into the girl’s puffy eyes. She would bite the insides of her lips raw during these visits, wishing an aneurism would pop the friend’s head open right there in the brain patient ward.
The girl’s friends never visited after the first week. But today five people she’d almost forgotten called to ask how she was and if the boyfriend would like to come have a barbecue. The girl’s hands shook each time she hung up the phone. They were still shaking as she stared out the window.
She was brave, she was strong, she was good. These are the things people say to a girl with a boyfriend in a coma or a boyfriend in a wheelchair who can’t spell his name. It was like someone had written a script on the wall of the hospital elevator. It was worse than what people said at funerals. They said it because they couldn’t see themselves sticking around for a year if it were their lover. Because they thought his life was over and hers with it.
But the girl knew something none of them knew. The day of the accident she’d been planning to break up with him. She was tired of his pot smoking and inaccessible nature. She was only 24 and had already been involved with another pothead boyfriend for six years. She was thinking about boys who drank wine. She’d always thought about girls. But after the boyfriend fell off his bike and almost died, she’d had a change of heart. She’d stayed because of love and guilt, but mostly because brain injuries and neardeath experiences can make people kinder.
The boyfriend who slowly emerged from the coma listened and didn’t smoke anything. He was often sad, but didn’t take it out on the girl. He was never jealous and always glad to see her. He confessed betrayals, asked forgiveness. Even though they only saw each other in the hospital with no chance for sex, their relationship was better than it had ever been when he was well. They understood each other; in fact, the girl thought perhaps the boyfriend out of a coma even understood her interest in women and her need for space.
But now that the boyfriend was almost better, his old personality was coming back. Now that he was moving in with her, everyone would find out the girl wasn’t a martyr at all, just a person who stuck around because she fell in love with someone who didn’t really exist. Someone she liked because of, not despite, his disabilities.
As the cab pulled into her driveway, the girl suddenly knew her boyfriend would relearn to ride his bike, go back to university, roll joints at 9 a.m., invest in diamond mines, say sexist things and hit on all her friends. When she called three years later to tell him a friend had committed suicide, he’d reply, “I came sixth in internet poker.”
