The Last Hour

I move along the platform, stumble bleary-eyed on the train and off. A hundred appointments, maybe more. I lose count. It’s a mad scramble to make it to the clinic before work, in the middle of work, only to wait for the train. Other trains in other directions fly by. Chanukah, Pesach, summer vacation, roaring past. Sometimes I feel that more than the treatments, the medication that might work, will work, it comes down to this. Waiting. Waiting on the platform.

The summer air, hot and cloying, hits us as we walk off the train and on to home. Two weeks’ wait. Two weeks to get on with life, work, supper. To pretend that we’re not waiting, not hoping, not clutching onto the gossamer threads of a dream.

Because to hope is to open oneself to disappointment. Dreams that haven’t been nurtured cannot be dashed. As if. As if we haven’t been here before. But it’s different this time, it has to be. The two-week verdict is Erev Rosh Hashanah.

I wake up early to have my blood test done. “You’ll have the results by seven this evening,” the technician says.