Time To Go

One: Kennedy

My patience is beginning to wear thin as I tap my feet rapidly on the laminate floor. The place is so clean I feel as though my very presence is going to corrupt it. White walls, dotted with posters about Chlamydia or Meningitis. Leaflets detailing information about the doctors and nurses who run the place are strewn carelessly across any polished surface of the waiting rooms.

I am Kennedy Brock and I have recently turned twenty-seven years old.

I feel as though I'm dying. I feel suffocated by the walls around me as beeps from machines and hushed voices are heard throughout the long corridors. I hate hospitals. The very smell of them, the way they feel, the way they make me feel... I run my fingers through my hair to try and ease my unknown nerves. It's not possible, not while I feel this uncomfortable here.

Most days, me being here is pointless, yet I still come. I take my only day off from my work at the bookshop in town to come and visit my sister in this ghastly place. I can't help but grimace as I look around. People waiting around me; arms in slings, coughs falling clumsily from their lips, various unknown problems filtering through the air, making me vulnerable enough to catch whatever disease is rife within this place.

I have been visiting my sister for the past two weeks now.

She has been suffering from Anorexia Nervosa which is a psychiatric illness that describes an eating disorder characterized by extremely low body weight and body image distortion with an obsessive fear of gaining weight. Well, that's what the experts say. But they mention nothing about the high blood pressure, the constant irregular sleeping patterns and the depression. No, you have to find that out for yourself.

However, lucky for me and my family, Annie is a spoilt little bitch, and therefore happens to see the funny side, which makes my blood boil. She's anorexic because she's stubborn. Call me careless and even a horrible person, but you haven't known her for twenty-four years like I have. She wants attention and this is the only way she thinks she can get it. She's pathetic.

Yes, I don't get along very will with my family. I talk. They don't listen, or don't care; I haven't made up my mind on which one it is yet. But it is one of the two, I suppose. I highly doubt that it's just a coincidence that keeps reoccuring.

Why do I visit her, I hear you ask?

Well, that's easy; because she's my sister, and bitch or no bitch, I hate to see her basically being driven insane. In fact, it physically hurts me... and deep down, I know I love her. She was sent here three weeks ago, as ordered by her doctors. She's now on a drip, being force-fed by a bunch of strangers with PhD's.

The thought makes me shudder, and I can't help but lean forward silghtly in my plastic chair as I bite furiously at my nails all the while waiting for five o'clock to arrive.

It's a Thursday and it's my visiting hour for my sister. Jesus, I hate seeing her in this place. She looks as depressed as I feel, lying helpless in the middle of a paper-coated bed with a drip stuck inside her skeletal arm. She doesn't need this. Not in her condition.

I sigh irritably as I lick my bottom lip.

I love books. As you probably realize from my job. Some days, actually most days when I visit my sister, I have the uncontrollable urge to run back to the bookshop and lock myself inside. The very presence of books soothe me. I often read out loud, when I'm in the glorious company of myself. Just finding the way the words roll off my tongue pleasurable in its own weird and wonderful way.

I sit back in my chair once more, waiting for my name to be called; my eyes dart to the clock.

Four forty-five... just fourteen minutes and fifty-eight seconds until five o'clock.

Another quarter of an hour of my life, wasted in this place that most people call home... that thought is enough to make me shiver - the thought of this place being someone's home. Or, more terrifying, their tomb...