Echocardiogram

There were about six other people in the waiting room at the Toronto Western Hospital’s Cardiology Clinic.

Each person sitting there was alone, each one with an empty seat on either side of them. They had arranged themselves in such a way as to suggest that human contact, or even just the proximity of another person, was a potential catastrophe, and that they might shatter into a million pieces if a stranger’s eyes, voice or touch happened to fall upon them. And so they all sat there– the respectful, fearful space between them somehow more visible than not– and across from them was a wall-mounted TV broadcasting the news of the day, but nobody was watching. Instead, people were looking down, focused on the phones in their hands and the transportive, less mortal moments it provided.

To what worlds, be they small or large or imaginary, were they journeying?

To whom were they returning?

And then I was called forth to have my test done. Stripped to the waist, I lay on a cot while the technician began an ultrasound of my heart. Music, as if from across a body of water, played faint and mysterious in the background. My eyes closed, I lay there just as still as a prayer. She spoke softly, when she spoke, and her touch was so very tender, so holy. The test proved a little bit challenging, and our ams and torsos were entangled like it was a game of Twister so that we could feel one another’s body rise and fall with each breath. It was so very intimate and so very lonely, and in that strange intersection I wanted her to put down her instruments and just hold me. I wanted her to tell me that Yes, everything was going to be okay, and to see the truth of this in her warm, unblinking eyes, and thus blessed, be released into the beautiful life from which I came.