What becomes of the night when dawn exhales its last breath?
Does it surrender, or does it linger, cloaked in silence?
In that fleeting moment, as darkness softens into light,
What truths are hidden in the stillness?
For even as the world awakens,
S...
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In your eyes, I see storms, In my heart, you leave calm. We meet, we part, but something stays, A trace of us in each of these days.
~~~~~~~
The rain had begun its quiet assault as the evening had enveloped the city, thin needles slicing through the cold night air. Jimmy barely noticed, his focus pinned on the chaos erupting in the hospital parking lot. Flashing red and blue lights painted the scene in whimsical hues, and the wail of a distant siren seemed to sync with the thundering pulse in his ears.
It had been an ordinary evening—ordinary enough for him to question why he had even come here. Just a mundane task: pick up the medical reports, hand them off, and leave. But then, fate had its way of turning the mundane into something catastrophic.
The attendant had told him to wait and the wait seemed to be never-ending that even the impulse to sleep crept in on him. He went to get a cup of coffee to wile away his time in the weak comfort as each hour ticked by. Now he was in the parking lot, the cup in his hand—a story half sipped and half abandoned—before returning inside to go back into the remorseless reading of time.
To his right and left, down the long hospital hallway, it was strangely quiet—unnervingly so, like the breathless calm before a thunderstorm. The only sound was the faint pop of the overhead lights, mechanical and rhythmic, like tiny motors reminding him that life here moved on, even in silence. He felt himself sinking into the stillness, the monotony pressing against him like an invisible weight—until it broke.
The sound of wheels scraped against the polished floor, dull and uneven, echoing faintly off the smooth walls. He turned instinctively, catching a fleeting glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. At first, it seemed ordinary, just another stretcher rushing by—a scene so routine he barely noticed it anymore. But then came the voices.
They were sharp, clear, and edged with fear, cutting through the silence like the blade of a scalpel.
"Internal bleeding... multiple bone fractures... only slightly stable."
Jimmy's gaze followed out of habit, not curiosity. Words like severe, tragic and dire had long since become part of his daily lexicon, their weight dulled by repetition. But this time, something shifted. A tug deep inside stirred him awake—an almost instinctual pull, a familiar urge to step forward, to check for a pulse, to ground himself in the tactile certainty of life clinging on.
He hesitated, watching as the stretcher disappeared through the swinging doors of the next ward, its urgency swallowed by the maze of corridors.
And then he froze.
It wasn't the tone of the nurse's voice or the urgency in her words that stopped him. It was something deeper, a primal sense, an unspoken recognition that clawed its way to the surface. His breath hitched as his feet rooted to the floor. For a moment, the distant echoes surged back, engulfing him like a rising tide, and he stood there, paralyzed, staring into the void left in the stretcher's wake.
