Acedia

Sterilized Feelings

I hate hospitals.

The smell of sterilized walls and sterilized hearts seeping through the cracks in the ceiling where ghosts of the people once alive, now dead, claw at your throats, and you can't quite explain the chill that runs down to your toes,
oh darling are you dying today, are you dying?

There are so many needles poking holes through skin, poking holes through veins, spilling blood, spilling guts, spilling, spilling, spilling and the tear tracks frozen on your face look like they've been engraved on you forever and
oh darling you look like you're dying, are you dying?

I will hold your hands and try not to cringe at the touch of bone against naive innocence, I don't know what it feels like to have parts of me removed and parts of others sewn back on, I don't know how it feels like to rot and waste and lay in wait for the vultures ad wolves, I don't know any of this, all I know is your face doesn't look like your face anymore and,
oh my god don't lie to me, are you dying?

You don't smell like the sea anymore with a hint of lavender mixed in, no, you smell like a freshly dug grave and crisply burned ash, and where has all the life gone, you used to be the music I danced to, the tune I sang to and now, and now, and now, you're falling apart and my hands are too tiny to hold your broken shards and your heart falls to the floor and rolls under the bed and honestly I can't recognize it anymore, there are too many stitches, too many tubes, too many deformities, and oh god, oh god, oh god, you can't die yet, you can't,
but I know this now, you are dying.

Your ribs protrude under my skin like jagged rocks on high mountains and your tears run down my cheeks like waterfalls that crash on my chest, and wave after wave of agony beats and batters me into nothing and I want to say sorry but my words are held behind a throat that closed up in guilt and regret, why didn't I come here before, I should've been here before, I should've been here all this time,
but I wasn't and now, you are dying.

The beep-beep of the machines are deafening and my legs are shaking so hard that my kneecaps collide to the rhythm of your failing heartbeats and I know there isn't much time, there isn't much time, there isn't any time at all, and your bones dig into my hollow spaces and they hurt more than a thousand knives being twisted in my spine at once, but I'll embrace that pain, gladly, because it is the last thing I can do for you,
you are dying.

One second there seems to be so much noise, as if all the chaos in the world has condensed to that one single point and it is driving me to the point of utter madness but then the crooked green line suddenly falls flat and all the noise seems to fall along with it and then there is nothing else, nothing else, nothing at all, just an empty void, a null, dull ache that settles so deep within me I can barely feel it's existence pumping softly in my blood as my heart cries your name out once, and chokes on the second syllable the next time, and I can't breath, oh god, I can't breath, oh god.
Oh god. 

Your eyes are wide open but they don't see anymore and your protruding ribs lie still like it's been fossilized for centuries and the little green line is lying flat against my hopes and dreams and my future, that little green line laughs at me, taunting me, taunting me and
I don't know what to do.

I go numb.

I don't cry.

I'm sorry.

I crumple down in green-tiled bathrooms and gasp for air while my fingers grip the porcelain edges of the sinks that smell like mold and I see your face in the mirror instead of mine, and I know I'll see your face in mirrors for an entire lifetime, and I'm crying now, I'm crying so hard that my legs give way and I collapse upon myself and all the promises I couldn't fulfill and all the lies I convinced my frazzled mind on nights when sleep fled the side of my bed and I talked to myself instead. 

And now I'm thinking about how all the antiseptic in the world couldn't dull this pain and how all the needles in the world couldn't stitch my broken heart back together, and how all the tablets and pills couldn't make me feel better because you're not here, not here, not here, you'll never be here again.

Oh god, I hate hospitals.

Because whenever I walk into them, it reminds me about how you died in one.

―  But then again, I don't need to be reminded because I have never forgotten. I couldn't if I tried., S.M.