A long time ago, I read somewhere that yellow skies portend trouble. It was in a book about dust storms on the southern plains; the narrator, a child, watched as viscous winds gave way to a vicious tempest, turning and tunneling until most everything was destroyed.
This is the scene that came to mind the first time that I saw her. When I approached her hospital bed, in the early morning hour of a Monday, she blinked her eyes open, and all I could see was yellow. It bled from the ring of her iris to the rims of her lashes, an unceasing lemon glow. It was neither refreshing nor rousing, unlike the porous rind of the citrus fruit it recalled. Rather, the yellow offset the focus of her eyes, giving her gaze the languor and pallor of a thick syrup. This heavy-lidded stare shed a certain sadness, and it spread through the hospital room, hardening the air and all that it touched. When it followed me to her bedside, my chest tightened, my stomach sank; what struck me most was that these eyes sat within the smooth contours of youth, not embedded within wrinkles and gathers of skin.
She came from a place of sweet lemons, the home of citrus seas in the middle east. When she grew up, before she learned to stroke her throat and bring up green, she drank lemon water with mint to cool off in the afternoon sun. She told me about the lemon-mint when I asked about her if she drank.
She was forthcoming when I was specific. She said she started in the morning, right after she awoke. Then, steadily, she absorbed the fruit of fermentation over the hours of the day; as it flooded her blood, her mind retreated, and soon she felt nothing at all. She stayed in bed mostly, sometimes watching television, sometimes listening to music, sometimes reading. She grew weaker, she struggled to stand. He had to carry her to the bathroom; but he did it lovingly, she said.
She told me that she was always able to stop when she needed to; she had stopped for the fall semester, for the spring semester, and when it became too risky to buy it in her home country. But she was always started again, too, when she could. Like now, when she was on summer break from graduate school.
Her finger tips were also yellow, nicotine kissed, but that had started to fade. The bruise on her flank, once the shape of a purple fist, gradually grew gold. Especially once he stopped visiting. But the fluid we evacuated daily from the side of her stomach remained the color of straw; and her eyes, day after day, continued to glow lemon.
One day I walked in and watched her thin frame heave; with one hand, she braced herself on her bed, with the other, in a fist, she thrust a black plastic spoon to the back of her throat. She withdrew the spoon when I lowered her hand; in the same motion, she plunged the other into the cavern of her throat, liberating what she needed gone. This is what she needed to do, she told me: in the morning, after meals, with emotion, in remorse. After that, someone sat by her bedside every hour, someone accompanied her to the bathroom. After that, she glared yellow at me for a while.
On the last day that I saw her, I placed my hands along the curves of her abdomen and felt her skin-warmth permeate my gloves. Her flanks were full and firm, distended and stiff in the same disquieting way each quiet morning. I tapped on her abdomen, left and lateral, above the crease of her iliac crest; a soft thud came back to me, nearly obscured by the rustling of my gloves. I lifted my hands and she rolled onto her side, facing away towards the window. I tapped again and a tympanic timbre rebounded. I lifted my hands and she adjusted again; she stared yellow at me, smiled “good morning”, and slipped back into her swollen slumber. I did not shake her awake to whisper goodbye.
The smooth convexity of her stomach-skin, which I percussed and palpated each morning, disguised the gnarled process unfolding below. Lennaec, of stethoscope fame, applied the word “kirrhos” in 1812 to describe it; he famously selected the Greek word to describe the tawny color he saw on gross observation of autopsied livers. Lennaec’s cirrhosis was then the eponymous name given to describe liver failure to alcohol abuse. I think, perhaps, we do not give his naming enough credit; He must have seen, as I do, that what is yellow is not simply the liver pathology; rather, the yellow saturates the whole of the human.
Many years after I read the book, I learned that the yellow skies that precede some storms are the result of light filtering through a particular density of clouds, at a specific angle, at a precise humidity. In many ways, her yellow eyes, like those yellow skies, also reflect a layered process: a soul filtered through addiction, disordered eating, depression and violence. In the way that storms pass to yield blue skies, I hope the storm will fade from her soul, and from her eyes.