I Fell in Love with Hope(50)

I should’ve been scared. I think a part of me was. Another was curious. About the blood. Blood is accusatory. It spreads, and it stains, and its reach is infinite.

I wanted to know why.

My first memory makes hospitals seem like a violent place. Hospitals are not violent. Hospitals diffuse violence and cure its victims.

My second memory is less gruesome. More sudden. Just as sad.

There was another soldier. This one was silent. You might’ve thought there was no life behind his eyes till he blinked. He took breath after breath, one hand on his chest. Then, his hand fell. His eyes closed. He stopped breathing. Red pooled from the spot he held and dripped from his fingers.

When the one-legged man woke, he started to scream again.

He crawled out of the cot, dragging himself across the floor. Screaming, crying, screaming some more. He grabbed the other soldier’s bloody hand hanging off the bed and wailed into it. The nurses had to pry him off.

Until he fainted, the soldier stared at the dead man. He cursed, as coherently as he could. He cursed the war. He cursed the nurses and doctors and hospital alike. He cursed death most of all.

My second memory makes hospitals seem like a field. A place of harvest for death to collect. I don’t argue with that. I challenge it silently as the soldier silently waits to die. Same as him, I don’t believe it. I accept it. I have to.

Death is not a being. It is a state of being. We humanize it, demonize it, give it a soul because it is easier to condemn something with a face. Disease is in the same boat, only it’s a lot easier to convict it. Disease has reason. Virus, bacteria, defected cells. Those already have a face.

Time doesn’t need a face at all.

Time steals openly.

Such carelessness on its part is enough to be found guilty.

Guilty of what, though? Time, Disease, and Death don’t hate us. The world and its many shadows are not capable of hate. They simply don’t care about us. They don’t need us. They never made, and as such, never broke any promises. We are mediums through which they play.

I call them shadows. Sometimes, enemies, although that may be a bit hypocritical. They are mediums through which we play too.

Disease is weaponized. It’s profited off of. Humans rarely search to cure diseases. There’s more value in treating someone for the rest of their life than in healing them once. Death is no different. It’s a means to an end, a tool, a toy. With it, the people at the top of the pyramid decide how many will be sacrificed at the bottom.

No one is better at killing people than people.

Time is different. Chase it, gamble with it. No matter the game, time likes to play because it always wins. But unlike its partners, time can be kind. Or maybe that is an illusion too. Maybe time has teeth only to grin and a voice only for the last laugh.

I don’t understand it enough for a concrete answer.

I don’t understand a great many things. I give them all souls too. Blood has a soul. Books have souls. Broken things have souls–especially broken things. Even the hospital has a soul traipsing through the halls, watching, like an onlooker inside its own bones.

Souls are susceptible to suffering.

That’s why I bury memories.

Living them once was enough. Reliving them is a destructive habit.

But my memories of him are ones I have buried inside a glass coffin.

He is the one who broke a pattern in the red.

He was a little boy who rose with the sun when the night was all I knew.

—

There is never any wasted time with him. He plays with life to every extent.

“Hello, wall,” he says, dragging pudgy hands across the ashy, poor paint. “Hello, floor.” The uneven tiles clack against his feet. “Good morning, sir,” he says to a passing doctor. “Good morning, sky,” he says to a passing window with a crack in the checkered glass.

The boy gives souls to all. He calls them his friends.

Even his disease has a soul. It’s an all-encompassing kind. His medication, his exams, his treatments are all to be administered exactly on time. Little does it know, time has a challenger.

The boy laughs, rocking his legs back and forth at the foot of the bed. The nurse takes his temperature and then reaches for his morning pills. He opens his mouth just enough for her to slip them in. With a bite, he shuts it before she can and runs off, laughing.

Time, along with many nurses and doctors, ends up having to chase him. Him and his bursts of rebellion. When they catch him, he always asks the nurse or the doctor to stay and play with him. They sigh, apologize, and say they have other patients to treat. He is the same with service workers who bring him his food. The service workers shake their heads daily, apologize, and say they have other patients to feed. The boy smiles and says he understands. Then he says hello to his plate, to his fork, to his cup, and he eats on his own.

I follow the boy after his morning medication round and his check-ups. I am not curious about those parts of his life. I already understand what’s wrong with him. I want to understand what he is. I want his in between moments.

An explorer, he runs across the halls without care, asking questions, not to anyone in particular, but just to ask.

He has no care who is watching or where he is. He moves like he is a part of the hospital, a universal puzzle piece. He becomes, as I am: A background detail noticed but not questioned like the color of a wall or the weight of the front door.