It's never that simple

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When you're trying to figure out where to go in your life it's not a crossroads. It's not ever anything so straightforward as a crossroads. It's the middle of the untracked prairie. It's the center of the ocean.

She is at the bottom of the ocean, she is far away from her life. Perri Klass, Other Women's Children

***

The week-for-the-uninsured posters in the metro are mostly down now - it's back to whole cars of Magic Johnson's face over injunctions to take your HIV drugs, and the blank, unhappy faces of twelve-year-old kids over would-be-clever instructions that when your kids tell you to fuck off, what they really mean is 'please give me boundaries.' But I still think about the one with the girl walking on the railroad tracks, and hope Eprime never saw it because it says that what happened to her mother can't happen.

Her mother had insurance, and went to the doctor. Maybe the first doctor was clueless - the second opinion does seem to suggest that. But it is not that simple. It is never that simple. Insurance doesn't buy a cure, it buys percentage points. It doesn't buy an easy death.

Money was the food she couldn't eat and the wig she almost never felt well enough to bother wearing and the bone-marrow transplant that gave them the Christmas everything was going to be all right so she fought with Eprime every day.

***

Being in the closet is not the root of all my problems, thankyouveryfuckingmuch. If it were, coming out to my parents would have solved more of them.