Small good things.

Friday night. Lighting flashes the street outside the window. The thunder infuriates the dogs. They yip, growl, storm from the front of our shotgun house to the back with the hope of wrangling the thunder.

"I rock!" Trudi yells. We're both sitting Indian on our super-sized air mattress. Trudi's cradling a plastic guitar on her lap. "We earned a trophy," she says.
"For what?" I say.
"I really couldn't tell you," she says.

I have a Playstation 3, a fifty-inch plasma and Percoset. There was a time in my life when I considered such a combination the apex of existence. Now, it's a blessed respite.

I've played Guitar Hero once, drunkenly, at a friend's house on New Year's Eve. I never bought it because it was sort of pricey. This was certainly something I considered unessential. Now? All references point to a week ago. Hanging out in an ICU, watching the second hand tick towards the morphine. Holding statue-still, I desperately tried to maintain the seal of numbness--any breath, swallow, or blink leaked in such horrid sensations. So what's pricey?

I try to remember how bad I felt then, how I wasn't sure if the pain would ever go away. I want to hold on to my desperation, my disbelief in the relentlessness of that suffering. Those moments feel too distant. I'm losing something; I can't place what. The last time I felt any serious pain was days ago. I can bend full from the waist to the floor, pick things up without having to stop and take those frightened depressurizing breaths. It's all been too easy to forget.

We meet with the doctors Friday, but I don't want to think about procedures, percentages, recoveries. I want to yell at my dogs for barking at the rain. I want to eat Percocet and watch Trudi score high on Duran Duran's Hungry like the Wolf.

I don't want these moments to end, but I must continuously breathe in their frailty.