Dearest Appendix,
I know this isn’t the way it’s supposed to be done. Writing like this. But, (other than our date later today) it’s the only way I have left. (Is anyone else feeling warm?) Here, late at night, sitting alone at my kitchen table listening to the rain and wind, wondering what you look like now after the last six months of quietly torturing me from in there, my mind goes numb, (I’m warm. Are you? It is just me?) Sort of buzzing, really, my thoughts edge closer to pure sarcasm, and I am left with nothing for you but tears. Of joy. Pure, unadulterated almost-illegal joy. (Maybe it’s me. Never mind.)
Being with you has been strikingly like being with several of my ex’s: uneventful—dare I say comfortable ho-hum? (No, it is warm in here.) Flatly uninteresting, even. More accurately: dull. (Yes— it’s warm in here— it is. I’m a bit dizzy, I think.) With bland expanses of deadening sameness followed by forgotten tedium and startling boredom. Like so many of those fellows, I’d never known you were even there, that is, if you didn’t act up and go and get all inflamed about something that likely had nothing to do with me in the first place. (Could I be running a temperature? No way. It’s just warm in here.) Such irrational behavior for something so ineffective with little or nothing to offer. I ask you, as I have asked those other hangers-on in the past: What is it that you do, exactly ... ?
Being with you has taught me much. I had no idea a person could survive that much toxin and live to tell. I was unaware how quickly a mostly-youthful (middle-aged) body could lose power from a sustained high fever, or from laying in a hospital bed for a week, or how heavy a tiny Dixie cup of water is when one can’t so much as lift their arm to the rolling bedside table with built-in drawer/mirror. Did you know that extended doses of antibiotics dull one’s speech and memory—not to mention motor skills—which is among the reasons driving a car (or tractor) is forbidden for a week? I see now how very lucky I am to have a life that does not necessitate the operation a forklift. And yet there is so much for which I am grateful, so much of which I am proud, so much I will cherish well into my declining years. But you’re not one of them and now it’s time to say good-bye. (I’ll take a glass of water if you’re up. With ice. Open a widow?)
You have your ways, I have mine. You’re ... an appendix. That’s all you’ll ever be. And you literally blew that. You tried to take me down with you but I am stronger than I look, even from your dark and oozing perspective. You tried your best, but I have high expectations for the leeches in my life, buster, even a leech like you, who keeps trying to bring me down, time and again despite your own miseries. I have spent the better part of six months trying to break up with you, you little pus bag, and later today I will finally get my wish. Then, with elated glee and a song in my heart I will celebrate and dance and folly at our final parting. They will find me performing agile back-flips in my flimsy patient gown, down the center of the hospital concourse past the front desk auxiliary ladies in pink, past the blood bank waiting room, through infectious disease and coronary care, around the gift shop candy-stripers and along the elevator banks; even if that celebration is a hazy drug-induced hallucination.
Let’s face it: You’re a useless, overinflated, leaky appendix. You’re not even good enough to go in a jar. But I have hands that held a pen that signed a paper agreeing you have to go. Swiftly and with some pain killers later for me).
