a memoir lmaooo


When I was around seven years old my family was visiting Chicago for the summer. My khala just had twins, so obviously everyone in Chicago wanted to visit. However, the birth was complicated and my cousins were in ICU, and my aunt was recovering. The hospital had a huge fountain that went all the way up to the glass ceiling, the sunlight reflected on the water creating some semblance of a rainbow in the middle of the hospital lobby.
I can recall walking in then everything afterward is almost a blur, and somehow I ended up being stuck in this waiting area on the prenatal floor, with my grandpas sister-in-law. She is a emotional woman, rarely goes anywhere without her husband, but seeing that he was awaiting a court date in Jordan at the time, she had to adapt.
The waiting area near the reception desk had an overall beige vibe and was poorly lit. I was shivering in my t-shirt and jeans, the AC was on full blast to combat the sweltering heat of a Chicago summer. Nanu was arguing with the receptionist, trying to convince the nurse on duty to allow her to see her niece. I wasn’t paying attention to the commotion at the desk, I was more or less focused on not freezing to death right then and there on that plastic bench, when suddenly I hear my name being called, “Sofia! Come here and please explain to this woman that I want to see Mahi.”
 I slowly dragged myself up to my feet, my mind dull.
Nanu then said mostly to herself, “I haven’t been able to see her, I don’t know if she’s okay, I don’t know what’s going on!”, then to me, “Sofia can you just tell the nurse what I want, she wont listen to me.”
 “Ahem, okay…. Ma’am I am going to have to tell for the umpteenth time you cannot visit her right now.” The nurse in question was looking back and forth between us two, with her pencil thin eyebrows furrowed and her arms crossed.
In response, Nanu raised a fist to the heavens, “I tell you that I want to see her, she is my daughter, let me see! Why I can’t see her? You don’t tell me why! Child, tell her, can you just ask her what is happening? No one tells me anything…this country is a mess…no one respects….”
I was out of place, I didn’t have any experience translating for anyone.
With my face burning despite the frigid temperature of that godforsaken waiting room, I looked up at the nurse, “Ma’am, uhh, why can’t we visit her?”.
The nurse looked down at me with a frown and huffed, “As I’ve said numerous times before, she’s incredibly incapacitated, and policy says only immediate relations can visit her at the moment.” She frowned even more and squinted her eyes, “Are you her immediate relations?”
I turned towards Nanu and asked, “Uhh, are you immediate relations?”
“What does that mean?”
“it means like are you, uh, related to her or-”
“No. It means, is she her mother?”
I turned back to the nurse and said no.
“Aha well that’s a shame isn’t it?”, she plastered on a sympathetic smile, “Hm, well according to hospital policy, I am going to have to ask you to step away from the desk and wait.”
She dropped back down at her desk with a satisfied expression, effectively ignoring us.
Nanu pounced. “What happened? What’s the room number?”
“I don’t know, like, she’s very sick and you’re not immediate relations-“
“Child, what is the room number?”
“I don’t know! She didn’t give it to me, Khala is sick and you can’t visit her just yet. We have to wait-”
“Wait? Wait?!” her eyes flashed, “This woman wants me to wait! After all this time? All I have been doing is waiting! For the past three hours I’ve been waiting!”
“What did you tell her?”, She stared hard at me, “I asked you such a simple thing….”
I frankly, stopped listening after that. I felt embarrassed and slightly angry. At the time, I thought, what did she expect from me? I was only seven, it’s not my fault I had the language but not the confidence to talk to a stranger.
She stormed back to the desk and this continued for another twenty minutes or until an ‘immediate relation’ came out to get us from the waiting room.
Everyone ended up healthy and happy in the end. So yeh wlweklj

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