A piece originally submitted to the Anthology Magazine 2024 personal memoir competition…it didn’t win.

---

The box I’m sat in is inside-out. Instead of labels stuck to the outside of this box, the information is recorded inside, in real-time. People come and go, but I won’t be leaving my box, not for six days.

I’m grateful to have my own box – room 23, Ward 3A West – instead of having to time-share a 4-bed dorm with other patients. Despite sharing the following thousand words with anyone generous enough to read them, I have always been intensely private and enjoyed my own world. For the next six days, my own world will be my box.

I didn’t plan to be here, but I’m in the safest place I can be right now: a hospital ward with world-class cardiac care. Yet, I need to protect myself. Not from my dicky ticker or malfunctioning pacemaker, but from external noise.

I’m here because something has gone wrong, something I can’t control. My recovery is in the hands of others, so I need to take control of what I can. I can control external noise.

To do this, or to at least pull off the illusion of taking control, requires a performance that must be kept invisible to others. Method acting so convincing that no one, least of all me, shall doubt that this situation is a temporary thing, that I’m calm, collected and unflinchingly stoic, that I’m the living embodiment of the Man become of Kipling’s If.

My box on Ward 3A West is just another stopping post on a journey. I guess I know the final destination, hopefully a long way off still. I have stopped in similar boxes before, of course. I have the scars to prove it. Scars, internal and ex-, that remind me that if I can block out noise, I can stay focussed. Stay focussed, and this will remain a temporary thing.

So, to construct a safe-zone, comprised solely of four mid-grey plasterboard walls and (very lucky) an en suite toilet, is an instinct I have developed from experience.

I can’t control what information is recorded by the machines that I’m wired up to 24/7, checked each of those hours by saints in sky blue scrubs, but I can control what information leaves my box. It wouldn’t help anyone to be worried about how I am. I’ll drip-feed my news through sporadic messages, dampen the seriousness, joke about it.

Friends and family reply with best wishes and offers to visit. I’m grateful for such offers, but they threaten the impermeableness of my box. So often in the past that most benevolent of questions, “how are you?”, has unwittingly chipped away at my shell. My skill at keeping that hidden until now is surely unparalleled, but there’d be no hiding it now that I’m the focal point in my box. All eyes are on me whilst I sit here in my least comfortable position: centre of attention.

At first, I’m deliberately slow in responding to those offers to visit. When I do hesitantly reply, I employ a stock answer along the lines of ‘no need, I’m fine on my own…honest’. I block out the world, fix my gaze forward, wear blinkers. A musical accompaniment through my earphones and my head in a book will allow me to form a protective bubble.

Room 23 has a sole square window, allowing a glimpse out of my bubble. The view is restricted, but my geography is good, and I know this part of London well. Over there are all those hours on the dance floor at Fabric with Kev; there’s the roof of Smithfield Market, where Sam was convinced he could buy cheap art prints, despite my protestations that he’d only find cuts of meat; and there passes the route from the Barbican that I walked Rebecca along, making sure she’d not get lost en route to Farringdon (again).

Memories are welcome visitors. I should extend the invite. The love of others would be the best medicine.

My sister visits each evening, bringing warmth, good coffee, and sufficient calorific snacks to stave off boredom. Mum and dad arrive, bringing love and worry.

Mobile traffic picks up. News percolates in – the horrors of foreign conflicts and domestic riots provide perspective, at least. Videos of slapstick gaffs counter with light relief.

The outside has come in. ‘I’ becomes ‘we’.

Other intrusions are less welcome.

The cleaner comes daily; the walls remain grimy. Breakfast arrives; and gets pushed to the side of my plate. Cannulas are a toe-curling ordeal; they’ll leave track marks for a fortnight.

It’s not just my box that is inside-out. Everything becomes inverted. Shapes shift.

My sister notices that my en suite’s full-length mirror reflects a taller, leaner image. This disappoints me. I’d convinced myself that my diet of hospital mush had made me more athletic.

Time warps. Will that make it easier to maintain this situation as temporary? Or will it stretch this thing out, turning it into the new normal?

“Time for your obs” is a refrain cheerfully sung to me every few hours. Oxygen – fine; temperature – good; blood pressure – low.

“Time to do your bloods”, a daily apology. Needles. My veins participate in the most tiresome games of hide-and-seek. “Maybe I’ll try again on your other arm”.

What of identity? What, if anything, does this confinement do to the self? To me? My name and date of birth are confirmed regularly. My vital statistics too. Am I now just a set of metrics, dependent on technology? The gene that corrupted as I came into existence and that is the root cause of my being on Ward 3A West, my origin story, falls within the Lamin A/C group. Its full name is a series of characters two lines long. Perhaps in my box I am reduced to a similar data set.

Could that be why I let those memories in through the window? A need to be more than data and diagnosis. We are human because we are more than our DNA, our heart rate, our height and weight. I return to that window time and again, not to stare blankly at the summer day that I’m missing out on, but to look for pieces of me.

Nothing could be more humbling than this whole experience. Being cooped up in my box draws forth the vulnerability of knowing my body is failing. Also present is the stark reality that if I had been born perhaps half a century earlier, I would likely be dead by this, my fifth decade.

In recent years I have learnt to allow darkness to be present, to let it exist instead of repress it, even give it a name, and then place it into a box, put it away, and move on. But this is no time for existential crisis: I shall not allow these thoughts to occupy me now; there shall be time for that reckoning in the weeks to come, when my body is recovered.

Instead, I’ll allow myself to be humbled by the care and dedication of the professionals around me. Their skill and knowledge are exceptional, but even greater is their innate compassion. ‘J’ was the first nurse I met: calm assuredness, skillful, kind. ‘K’ was my nurse on day two: bright vivacity, funny, efficient. ‘R’ on day three: smiling serenity, wholesome, confidence verging on nonchalance. These are good people, even if they do make me pee into a plastic flask at nighttime.

What compels them to care about other people? Why do they do it? Do they need to care?

And my family and friends, do they also need to care? Of course they do. Their need is in-built. They need to be here, for me to let them in. Their need to care for me – which, I stress, is mutual – means that I am part of who they are, and vice-versa, and is what joins us as a living, breathing nucleus.

On admittance to Ward 3A West I had shut things down, closed people out, confined myself to my box as a coping mechanism, a means of survival. That was my instinct. Our survival, our ability to cope, is fortified by others, and they need to be let in just as much as I need them.

As much as I hate the attention, I am the main character of this drama. This one’s all about me. But there’s an ensemble cast and a sub-plot of equal importance. I might be the one confined to my box, but this story is just as much about other people.

There is a quote that I subscribe to, often misattributed to Chekhov, that goes “any idiot can face a crisis; it’s the day-to-day living that wears you out”. This idiot chooses to face crises by boxing himself off, but really, it’s the people and the world that I allow in that means I won’t be worn out.

---