Purgatory is High, Low, and Inside Me

PURGATORY IS HIGH, LOW, AND INSIDE ME 

by Emily Carrasco-Acosta

(Content Warnings: death, medical trauma, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, and chronic illness)

        i. 

My top three worst fears are as follows:

1. Being lost at sea and you fall in. All you see is the dark expanse of water. You feel the tentacle of some deep sea creature latch onto your foot just before you die by drowning. 
2. Finding out you are allergic to something that you’ve eaten just fine before—bonus points if it’s a food you love. Anaphylaxis takes over but you live alone, so when you dial 911 you can’t speak because your throat swells up. You go into shock and you die.
3. You’re told that you are a lot sicker than you thought could ever be possible, and your life isn’t yours anymore. Now you can die suddenly, unexpectedly, at any given time. 

That last one always needs more context, so here’s mine. It’s when multiple people in the medical field, all nodding, say yes that’s right, anyways nothing we can do now, come again in six months. They get your name wrong in the ushering out, and loudly gossip to the other healthcare workers a few feet away with oh, you would not believe it, this girl, when she started to cry I was like and proceed to make gagging noises. 

Some days, I wish to be an invisible fly, and hover around these people’s ears all day. I wish to buzz incessantly until they go mad and quit their jobs. Then again, I hate bugs. But I wish it all the same.

In any case, the common and obvious theme here, which threads together the fabric scraps of all my nightmares is death, death, more death, and dying. It makes for an impressive quilt. Huge patches of heavy, morbid patterns which I bundle myself up in every night. I wake up, sweating from its oppressive heat and frozen from repetitive nightmares, but like all regular people, I can’t sleep without some cover on me. 

Whether I want it or not, this death blanket stays, and suffocates me on the daily. 

There are some things not on my personal doomsday list. This is because I try to keep my anxieties in the realm of “very possible” to “highly unlikely, but you’ll kick yourself if it happens” ranges. Some things, though, are just so far out there that they wouldn’t even qualify for some low-budget, tacky horror movie that ends the careers of anyone who works on the damn thing. It’s not like some scornful ghost is going to come out of my TV and kill me.

Yeah. Those things are far out.

One early Tuesday morning, I’m shuffling my feet after another doctor’s appointment. I carry with me a collection of insulin pen supplies, information booklets, glucose tracking journals, a fancy marker, and Jerry, a plush bear that also has Type One Diabetes according to the tag on his fuzzy ear. 

Jerry, at the moment, is the most relatable person in my life. Jerry is also not a real person. But he is real to me, all the same.  

I’m still thinking very fondly about Jerry when I get to the elevator, squeezing the pink, squishy toe beans of his foot. I press on the button in a mechanical frenzy, as if I can will the elevator to go faster up the levels of the hospital building. It’s a will in false hope, similar to how I can “will myself to produce insulin again.” This latter manifestation is the topic of a drunk phone call with an uncle the other night. I have a small compulsion to harm myself the entire forty-eight-minute rant from him, which ends with “You should be taking enough vitamin C, you know? If you’re not shitting yourself, you’re not doing it right, you know? You get me? You get me, girl?” and such.

Once the elevator is here, I walk in and press the button for Ground Level. Today, I’m meeting my dad in the mall parking lot just over half a kilometre out from the hospital grounds. This is because evil is in the form of a sixteen dollar per hour cost for parking, where all one does is wait for seventeen hours at an ER for Tylenol.

Before the doors close, I see the shadow of a body cross my peripheral vision and enter the elevator with me. They stand there in that scratchy blue and white hospital gown, facing the wall opposite from the button board.  

I ask them, “What floor?”

The response is a groan. 

Some dread starts bubbling out from my ever-present fluvial despair. Each bubble floats up, delicate, whispers (wrong) as they pop in my head one by one. The groan sounds very much like an I’m in pain someone knock me out already type groan. It’s too familiar a pain, lately.

I try to ignore the popping sounds in my head, thinking that I’m being too judgemental. I’m anxious about facing any new situation nowadays. But it is a hospital—no one feels good here. I tell myself to be kind. I tell myself that nine times in a row before I summon courage to speak again.

I clear my throat, loudly, and say, “Excuse me, what floor do you need?”

They lift their head up.

It’s an expression of twisting agony that stops the world around me. 

“Can...?” the person groans. They crane their neck and crack it in a way that makes my vision narrow, a fisheye lens focusing on their mouth churning out words. “Can... you… see… me? See me? See me, see me, help HELP!”

One final bubble (WRONG) pops in my head, and I promptly black out. 

A few minutes later, the elevator opens at the lobby, and someone finds me in a pretzel twist and blubbering nonsense. Healthcare workers not only find poor Jerry flattened underneath me, but that my blood sugar is low, so I manage to escape an involuntary twenty-four hour hold at the psych ward despite their face was so horrible oh I’m sorry that sounds so rude but it looked bad wait that’s not it and standing in the corner right there, didn’t anyone see it?

I guess I’m lucky.

        ii.

A few days after my episode, I wake up in the morning to the sweet smell of basil. In fact, the taste rolls on my tongue so strongly I fly forward to avoid choking. 

What in the world— 

I’m actually choking on something! I cough and hack, my body shuddering harder than the window panes during tornado season, until I spit a large, wet leaf onto my hand.

I’m losing it, I think, I’m really losing it, but I feel pretty calm right now, so maybe I know, somehow, that logic can prevail in this situation.

I catch myself in the mirror: wild bedhead, drool drying at both corners of my mouth, and my pupils dilated from adrenaline. 

My God, I’m losing it. My God. My body is falling apart from the inside out, like a cake that you forget to put baking soda in and then it starts to fall apart and when you say this is fine actually you also realize that you put salt in it instead of sugar and that actually the icing is poison. I’ve poisoned myself and now I’m going to die.

Before I can catastrophize on my poison cake body more, I hear rummaging downstairs. 

Yes, I think, more brains on this is better. And eyes too. Maybe the leaf isn’t even there at all. Maybe I have diabetic retinopathy or glaucoma and now I shall have a stroke— 

I pad my way downstairs, counting the steps to stop myself from thinking, and I call for my mom. 

She’s eating vanilla yogurt on the living room couch and typing slowly on the bluetooth keyboard, with one finger, the name of the tarot lady she watches for the weekly fortunes on TV.

“Mom, look, in my mouth—” and I show her the herb. The greenery sits shrivelling in my palm, an exclamation mark that adequately finishes my sentence. 

“Hm? Oh, you found it!” She laughs and places the keyboard by her side. She then gets up and plucks the basil from my hand. “What are you doing, hjia? You don’t eat it.”

“What else are you supposed to use basil for?” I pause, and then, “I found it?”

“I put it under your pillow, but you move too much when you sleep. You’re lacking magnesium, I’m telling you. You should listen to your mother more. You will find that when I die, I was always right. Anyways,” she waves her hand around, “that’s how you stop dead people from coming.”

I look at her for a long time, then back at the basil. Back at her. 

“They said the sick women in our family were liars. We’re a lot of things, but not liars. Anyways, I asked my sister Maria what did my mom do when she was sick, you know, doing all those ghost things, and she was like what ghost thing, and I said you know, when she had the stomach problems and the heart attack, and my sister, may the Creator help her, started going on—” and then she goes on, until “—and she’s never been the same since her second divorce. Anyways, that’s why she swears by basil. It’s holy. It stops dead people from coming into your life uninvited.”

“It’s because I’m sick that I saw that person the other day? The dead person. A person who is dead.” I want to scream. I want to weep. I want time to stop forever. Why couldn’t I have the power to stop time instead of this?  

All I end up doing however, is saying “I hate the body I live in, I’m getting punished for living.”

“Oh, Mariana,” My mama stares into me. “I would take all your pain in a heartbeat if I could. I’d give you my pancreas, you understand?”

I can imagine her, all too clearly, handing me that small organ. Here you go my love, she’d say to me, take it, it’s yours. 

“Okay,” I say.

The basil doesn’t help. Apparently, Tia Maria is the first ever woman liar in our family. She sends us sad cat apology GIFs over WhatsApp from South America. 

What I find later is that I can’t tell upon sight if the ghosts are the unholiest of apparitions or if they’re actually human, fleshy bits and all. The only way I can tell is through touch, which horrifies me since I have what I like to dub the Mariana Personal Space Area, which is really just regular personal space. But it works every time; when my hands run through ghosts, there are wisps that lace between my fingers, like otherworldly water, and eventually mould themselves back into the purgative vessel.

The ghosts appear whenever my body carries too much glucose, or too little. So going to a public washroom when my blood sugar is high is the worst. This is because the bathroom always has crowds, and it’s too much to try nudging a person who either has to piss badly or is a ghost that screams when I make active eye contact. 

Having low blood sugar is more frightening than annoying, since I’m trying to balance pounding orange juice like nobody’s business with, again, people or not-people hovering over me. 

I hate having conversations with dead people. It’s always “You can see me? Thank God, please help me fulfill my earthly regrets so I can move on!” or “Hey, you fucking bitch, I’m talking to you, fucking look at me already, cunt!” 

You’re dead, I say to them, like clockwork, go to wherever you’re supposed to go, which I don’t ask details about since I will never sleep again if I do know. Where dead people go, that is.

What do you call the world where you’re between death and life, where you feel like you’re dead, but are very much alive? 

Ultimately, what keeps ghosts from appearing is gripping tight to this crumbling body of mine, which is to wax poetic on maintaining proper blood sugar numbers. It’s like a sandcastle collapsing under the force of a tsunami. I end up dodging ghosts left and right when I’m out of control, and I keep my booklet of glucose numbers on hand. Slowly, but surely, this purgatory grows smaller with effort and care. 

        iii.

There’s others like me out there, I discover. 

I find out through the internet, alone at home one day, by diving headfirst into forums and typing in I see dead people.

One post has that exact same topic header, a life mirroring mine. The comments under it detail the variety of magical yet very real happenings of their prognoses. Some people see colours that don’t exist, others can predict the weather perfectly, and more. 

Everyone says that they never tell their doctors about these things. If they do, all that can happen is either being put in a ward or being told to just live like that, see you in a year. Or both. Both is never good. 

Either way, the inhumane treatment and lack of understanding towards their illnesses, of any kind really, is worse than whatever the hell they’re experiencing now. 

After I browse through, staring at the many anecdotes of solidarity through sickness, I unplug every electronic device in my house, and lie down in the middle of the kitchen floor in complete darkness. 

I wish for my body to be a balloon, a balloon that flies up and up and up, and when it reaches space, it freezes and pops—a silent pop, there’s no sound in space, I read that somewhere—and my latex pieces drift away into the cosmos. 

I’m not a balloon. But I wish for my body to be one, all the same.

        iv. 

Her name is Angele. She gets hired at the little bookstore where I work part-time. 

She’s a year older than me, and the coolest girl. We talk about everything together. We groan about the manager, and I think her laugh is so sweet it makes my blood sugar go to chaos. I regularly excuse myself to shoot-up insulin in our tiny employee bathroom when this happens.

It’s the first time I want someone to know me. Really know me.

I always have some strange feeling that everyone in my life is just pretending that I’m not some burden or apocalypse personified. But with Angele, I can see her choose to ask me everyday, “How’s my favourite co-worker doing today?” and tuck a stray hair out of my face when I hold stacks of books in my hands. 

I didn’t mean for it to happen, but the likelihood of me having streaks of good luck is at zero percent. I personally believe that God, in His omnipresent, Catholic-shrewd way, probably follows some little ritual everyday. It goes something like this: make the sun rise, the plants grow, the rain fall, let me check, oh look Mariana is finally thinking maybe life is worth it, can’t have that now. The balance of the universe must be restored by her misery!

The incident happens in August, after a quiet and decent shift. That should always serve as a warning in my life.

It’s balmy outside, an obvious sign that global warming is getting no better. Angele’s standing at the bus stop on the street of the local Walmart, which has: a (former) Quiznos, a Gamestop, two clothing stores with only one employee in each at all times, and an electronic repair place with a sign containing the sole word “BREAK” between it and our shoddy bookstore.

There’s some guy standing there. “Hey there, little lady. Looking good.”

I march right up to him. I march right up and say, “Excuse me, she’s not interested,” since really, who is happy when you have some sleazeball talking to you like that? It’s a surprisingly firm statement, considering the fact that I’m shaking very hard. 

“Mariana,” she says, and she’s looking at me strangely. “Mariana, there’s no one there.”

“...oh.”

        v. 

It turns out that the shaking is not only because of my lack of confidence in a fist fight against a creep, but because my blood sugar’s low. 

It takes a while before I’m coherent. The creep screams at me with all the lung capacity a ghost contains: “You can see me, you bitch, I know you can, show me your tits!” and such until he disappears with my now stable blood sugar. After this, I explain everything to Angele. 

I try, but I sound so ridiculous that I start repeating I know this sounds ridiculous after every three words. 

She’s also trying to understand. “Oh, so you see things when your blood sugar’s bad? Didn’t know that’s a symptom of diabetes! All I learned is that diabetics pee a lot and to give them sugar. I was taught that by the first-aid course held near the Service Ontario, you know, the one right beside that weed shop on Main Street?”

“Well, the dead people thing isn’t really a symptom of diabetes. It’s more like a symptom of being me.” I scrunch my nose a little, “Also, what kind of stupid treatment is that? There’s nuance to this kinda stuff. Whoever made that course probably pronounces diabetes as ‘diabetus’ instead—okay, Fleming did too, but he gets a pass because he made insulin. Hey, how much is that course? It’s expensive, right? You should ask for a refund. Anyways, I know this sounds ridiculous, but I’m telling the truth, you can ask my mom. She’ll tell you the same thing.”

“You sure she’s not just indulging you in a fantasy?” 

“She doesn’t even indulge me for normal things like ‘my terrible fashion sense’ or my impulsive queue purchases,” I answer. “So no, it’s her brutally honest take. If you ask someone from, say, my old high school, they’ll probably tell you I’m delusional as ever. But hey, at least seeing ghosts is a more honourable delusion than joining an MLM and harassing your former schoolmates into buying your makeup or leggings.”

She barks out a laugh at the quip and I feel a little ache in my chest. The ache hurts in the shape of her smile, it twists and cuts my insides so good. It’s a mean, gentle little smile.

“You’re one funny girl, Mariana! I like that. Hey, do you wanna get breakfast with me tomorrow morning? Ghost-free, preferably, but I won’t complain if it’s not.”

“…I’d like that, I’d like that a whole lot.” 

        vi. 

It takes me a few weeks to figure out the reason I like Angele so much. 

Initially, I think her expressiveness is the culprit. Her heart isn’t only on her sleeve, it’s her entire outfit. Every face she pulls or sentiment she pushes out into the world makes me feel like she’s splashing ice-water over my head. Trying to find ways to express myself is like pulling teeth at times. 

Then, I think it’s her easy-going nature. With the whole ghost thing, she would have to be, although I have other quirks that are high-maintenance, such as only drinking juice from a particular brand, or filing my nails into an oval-shape curve, or counting my steps to make sure I finish with an even set instead of odd. But unlike me, if she somehow doesn’t fulfill her habits, she doesn’t think the world ends, but rather that she’s lucky that she has tomorrow to do it again. 

Then, there's her thoughtfulness. Consideration is so natural to her, it’s a habit. Some days, when I can’t put a name to what I want or need, she sticks by me until we figure it out. I know there are things about me that she doesn’t understand, and maybe she never will, but all the same, she respects them from the bottom of her heart. 

We're eating breakfast at a little diner in town when I realize the most profound reason for my affection towards Angele.

She takes a sip of my stevia sweet coffee and makes such a sour face that I can’t help but laugh. She flags down the waitress for sugar-free syrup without me asking and double-checks the bottle to make sure there’s no mistake. And she, unpractically, holds one of my hands while she cuts into the squishy flesh of fluffy pancakes with her fork, and asks me “How’s my favourite girl doing today?” 

Instead of reciting in the mechanical way I always do, for the first time, the very first, I say, with utmost sincerity: “I'm very happy that I'm alive to eat pancakes with you.” 

I like Angele because she makes me feel like a person, bridging that once insurmountable gap between me and the world. When I’m with her, I know that I’m real, that I’m present. That I’ll always feel something solid when I reach out for her. 

She smiles at me with such gladness that I don't feel guilty about my body, but instead like I belong in it, if only for this moment. 

It's easy to smile back.

        vii. 

“Oh, dear, thanks so much for coming.”

There are flowers everywhere, although I’m unsure of their exact colour. There hasn’t been colour since the accident, I think. My eyes are dry, and hurt so badly, but I can’t stop looking at the flowers. There’s a scatter of mums, roses, lilies, orchids, all kinds of foliage across the funeral home. I can’t help but think: why would they bring flowers for someone who prefers trees over flowers, and mushrooms over trees, and that one can bring the most beautiful mushroom, trees, and flowers here and it wouldn’t matter because they’ll all die in the end. 

I can’t stop looking at the flowers. 

“I’m very sorry for your loss. Your daughter’s a lovely person. Was. Um. Excuse me—”

        viii. 

“Holy shit, lookit what we have here! So you really can see ghosts?”

“Oh, so you died thinking I was some kinda liar?” She purses her lips at that and shoves her hands in her still-pristine down-jacket. “I told you, the women in my family are lots of things, but not liars. Well, maybe my Tia Maria is, but she means well.”

“Ah, sorry about that,” Angele says. “I guess I’m mostly surprised you can see me. Didn’t think I’d get stuck out here, but it’s not like getting hit by a bus makes you want to skip your way to heaven. But,” she eyes me now. I don’t like it, “you shouldn’t be seeing me if you’re doing okay. How are you treating yourself?”

I’m not a liar, so I choose to say nothing. I scuff my unreasonably expensive Doc Martens on the pile of dirt near the flowerbed resting on the grave. Her grave. Angele’s grave. Her tombstone reads as follows: Here lies beloved Angele Pajaro. She loved like an avalanche and will forever be missed.

“Is your blood sugar high or low?”

“High,” I answer. “It’s less immediately bad when it’s high. But what’s the problem? You’re not my doctor and I wanted to see you. Do I need a prescription to see my girlfriend of three months who’s a ghost loitering in the graveyard?”

“Well, I don’t need to be a doctor to say that you shouldn’t try to be a bad diabetic.”

“Bad diabetic, what does that even mean?” I mutter, looking up at her through my lashes. She’s so beautiful in the moonlight. “I’ll die, probably someday soon. Maybe a vending machine will fall on me; did you know it’s statistically more likely that a vending machine will kill you than a shark? Or maybe some Silicon Valley tech bro out there will have the power to move the moon and move it a few inches too close and cause all the volcanoes to erupt through gravity and destroy us all. Anyways, it’s good practice. People already treat me like I’m dead.”

Truthfully, I don’t know if it’s good saying this to someone who is, on all accounts, actually dead, but she’s not just someone I know. She’s Angele, and the misery in her eyes confirms that she does know, she does know that being in a sick body means that people think you might as well die. 

Being sick is magic, and it’s real. You have no tricks up your sleeve. You don’t lose, but you never win.

I visit her regularly, sometimes to chat, sometimes to see if she’s still there. Sometimes, I see her just to see if I still want to see her. I always do. 

I always do. 

“You know,” Angele squints at me, “It’s like you pick up sadness like those little fuzzballs, they’re called burrs. Like everywhere you go, they stick to you, and then you’re just covered in these little spikes, but you don’t even notice them until someone points them out.” 

“Maybe you can pluck ‘em out for me.”

“For that, you need to ask someone else, someone alive.” She’s right. I can’t touch her. “Oh, Mariana, what would your mother say if she finds out what you’ve been doing?”

I hate when she looks at me with those eyes. It itches where she stares, the same way it does whenever my family looks at me when I’m lying sick and alone on the floor. 

I ask her one day if she hates that I see her. Even as a ghost, I still want to know if she wants me around. 

She’s quiet for so long that I do a double take to make sure she didn’t suddenly ascend into heaven, or wherever people go when they’re good and die needless deaths. 

“No, I want to see you,” she says. “You’re it, for me, you know. I wanna see you everyday, but I know what it means for that to happen. And I don’t want it to happen to you.”

Of course, the fact of the matter is that the frequency of our meetings means out-of-control blood sugar, and eventually—eventually—I’ll land myself in the hospital. 

For the first time, nausea is not something that rolls from my thoughts, but from how weak my body is. It begins to frighten me when I ache all the time, when I struggle to climb up the stairs or even a slightly uphill pathway. It frightens me to see people everywhere, more than I thought possible, and know that many of them aren’t alive. They’re crowding the street, my garden, parking lots, the grocery store, the library, my home, my bedroom— 

The culmination of my lack of responsibility to care for myself now brings my third greatest fear so close to me, that if I reach out to touch these ghosts, I’ll be able to feel them. That if someone reaches out to touch me, I will disappear. One world is more real than the other now. 

I’m shaking by the time I reach her grave. I lie down between the flowers, and see Angele staring down at me. 

The air is different now. It’s wet, heavy. I feel like I’m underwater. I need to pee.

“What if no one loves me like this?” I ask her. “What if I’m too much, you know? It’s hard to be vulnerable when life forces you to do it everyday. I’m sick of being sick and vulnerable and alone.”

“But people do love you. People will always love you. You’re a likeable gal, you know.”

“I just want to do whatever I want. Live my life not so afraid of consequences. Maybe I want to have cocaine for brunch on Sundays. Why can’t I?”

“No one should be doing that! Besides, cocaine’s overrated, believe me. There’s nothing wrong with taking care of yourself, ya know? We all face troubles in our lives, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take care. You should live your life, go out, and be happy.”

“How do you do that, how do you even be happy?”

“Don’t really know that one,” she says, softly, tenderly. “But I was always happy with you. My sweet, little ghost girl. My favourite girl.”

I don’t know what to say to that. I never know what to say when my life is about to change forever. The air is so dense, I feel like I’m underwater. I want to breathe. And in the next moment, I realize that I will.

“Well, so long, Mariana.” She pauses, and then smiles that mean, gentle smile. “I’m glad I existed when I did. Glad you’re alive. Glad that you’re you.”

My eyes burn so badly at this point I have to rub at them, hard, for nearly a minute. When I blink, she’s not there anymore.

At that moment, the sunlight’s melody echoes in strokes across the trees and grass, a crescendo reaching me in a few heartbeats. The light’s warmth rings, silently, on my skin. It permeates the layers into my bloodstream and thrums its song all through my body. 

It’s the heartbeat of a new dawn. It sounds frightening and wonderful and new, new, new.

I go back home after a long while, and when my back hits the mattress, I start to laugh. I’m a pitiful, grotesque hyena. Then I start to cry. I heave my body forward, clutching at the horrible pain in my chest.

When I finally, finally fall asleep, everything is dark and empty, but I’m not alone. I cradle Jerry the Diabetic Bear in my arms, running my fingers over his smooth-material injection sites, and the bruises of my own. When I press my lips to his sites, I do them for myself. 

I don’t dream of anything. Not of ghosts, or drowning, or anaphylaxis, or white doctor coats, or the unknown of what my body could be tomorrow. 

I never dream again. I just simply, quietly, soundly sleep. 

        ix.

“Hey, it’s okay. I can see you. You can move on now. I know it’s hard, but you gotta do it. Listen to me, you’re dead now. But that happens. It all happens to everyone eventually. I can’t do much to help, but I can stay until you go. It’s only temporary, you know—everything in life is temporary. We could do everything in the world to be better people, and we can still die, suddenly, at any time. But now I don’t really think it’s so bad that it happens. Not that things are necessarily good when everything is out of control. That’s just what it is. For me, I’m sick. But I’m still me. I’m me and sick and it sucks but that’s okay. There’s worth in taking care of a sick body like mine. You get it, don’t you? That’s why you haven’t gone on yet. Oh, you’re fading away! I think my blood sugar is stabilizing... Well, see you later, then!”

        x.

Heaven’s too bright. I stare bug-eyed at all the colours around me, feeling very much like a mantis-shrimp. I wonder if I looked hard enough here, would I see God? Would God be a mantis-shrimp?

I hear a voice, “Oh, holy shit. Lookit who finally arrived! I told you not to come that fast, you know.” 

“Yeah, well, I always was statistically more likely to be crushed by a vending machine than end up lost at sea and eaten by a deep-sea creature. I can’t help but feel kinda silly now. Hey, is reincarnation a thing? I’ll edit my top fear list, so I never come near a vending machine again in the next life.” And I reach for Angele’s hand. We touch, we are touching, we are dead, we are so alive, we are sick, we are healthy. We are finally, finally, finally, together again. 

I smile at her, and say, “I wouldn’t mind being sick again, though. Isn’t that weird?” 

To this she smiles back. Mean, gentle, little, dead, alive.