Tonsillectomy Thoughts

Painfully Random

The first day discussing 1984 with his seventh-grade literature class rattled Hugo even more than the entire six weeks spent on Hersey’s Hiroshima. The kids spouted inane ideas, insufferable asides, and Hugo knew their restless spirits would someday precipitate his unraveling. Hugo swore that if he caught one more student texting beneath their desk during free-writing time, he’d walk right through the school’s ostentatious gates and never return. Today, however, Hugo spotted no culprits. Alas. For now, Orwell would have to suffice as a salve to the smug rapscallions passing for students at Hugo’s place of work, a 100-year-old academic institution called the Cove. In his twenties, Hugo never saw himself settling in San Francisco. But now, 11 years later, it finally felt like a home. And that was something he wouldn’t soon abandon.

Hugo hated (in order): Taylor Swift, fans of Taylor Swift, matcha lattes, dating apps, iPads, clichés, meet-cutes, minimalist films, foreign films, A24, pastels, primary colors, photography, reality TV (especially Love Island), grunge music (especially Nirvana), pop music (especially Sabrina Carpenter, Dua Lipa, and aforementioned Swift), alternative rock, EDM, slam poetry, hyperpop, R&B, hamburgers, vanilla, quesadillas, cinnamon, concerts, hiking, trees, museums, beaches, and children. In other words, he kept to himself.

He was married once, in love thrice, and burned one-and-a-half times (a threesome gone wrong always complicates his retelling of the penultimate relationship’s unraveling; he doesn’t like to talk about it). At 13, his first love consumed him and led to a brief period of vagrancy when she—Sally—left him for his older cousin. He couldn’t even blame her; David was as perfectly coiffed and carved as his Michelangelo-molded namesake. After Sally and David betrayed him, Hugo slept in a dilapidated barn behind his middle school, filling an empty pillowcase with fluffed hay and dousing his clothes in knockoff cologne to mask the scent of calcified cow feces. He sustained himself on the government-mandated milk cartons offered at school and could depend on one square meal a day at noon in the cafeteria. When he finally returned home and slept in his bed after nearly three weeks, it felt like no one realized he ever left.

For over a decade now, Hugo had been trying to work out his abandonment issues in therapy. He knew it all started with Sally. She was the beginning and end of everything. He had loved her so completely, so truly, so desperately. To free himself from her spell, he even gave that trendy EMDR business a whirl. No dice.

But Hugo never felt lonely, at least, not since developing a fanatical obsession with mastering the art of Turkic throat-singing. Six months ago, he watched a YouTube short and instantly fell in love with the artistic medium. It was the only way humans could produce multiple pitches at once. Magic, he thought. But the magic dissipated four months later when he paid a visit to an ENT and received a diagnosis of vocal cord nodules—benign lesions that, though noncancerous, would hinder his throat-singing aspirations.

He’d have to get a tonsillectomy.