The steady, insistent beeping of the heart rate monitor was deafening in the otherwise silence of hospital room 207. The smell of death and futile, grasping, so called miracle drugs was overbearing and almost unbearable as she breathed in and out in steady rhythm. The sheets wrapped tightly around her legs, paper like in texture and sterile in scent, were like a straight jacket. The walls, the floors, everything was colored a painfully bright white; befitting of a place where people came to die.
She reminded herself again that she was not dead, nor dying.
She was hyper aware of the presence next to her in the stiff leather hospital chair. Her mother certainly did play the part- back straight and stiff in a way that seemed attentive but really meant business, eyes feigning pain and worry, hands wringing together in what others would believe to be nervousness or fear when in reality it was anger. Her mother had been like this for a good hour solid, only ever speaking a word to her when someone was in earshot. Playing herself up as the scared, worried, loving mother she was not. A wolf donning a sheep's pelt.
Her gaze fell to the thick, beige, itchy bandages wrapped around her forearms from just above her wrists to her elbows. A few places on the bandages were stained a bloody red, vibrant and full of life in this room which was like a void of whiteness and impending, inescapable, suffocating fatality. The bandages wrapped tightly around her throat were surely also stained and dirtied with crimson red life water, as if to symbolize what almost was. Those bandages, to her, were a collar- tethering her to this world and everything that came along with existing in it.
She reminded herself, yet again, that she was not dead, nor dying. But oh, how she wished it was so!
Her mother breathed deeply, in through her nose, and exhaled an excessively loud sigh. Pushing the chair back away from her hospital bed her mother stood, a woolen grey petty coat dwarfing her small frame and grey designer boots with 6 inches of pure, unadulterated heel making her appear taller than she really was. Without so much as a single word her mother was gone, and she wondered unusually playfully to herself why her mother's plastic Barbie legs didn't squeak when they rubbed against one another.
Left alone in the solitude and silence of her hospital room, she could do nothing but turn and stare at the tall, full-bodied mirror that hung on the wall just beyond where her mother had previously been wasting oxygen on herself. She flinched as she took in her usually sleek, silky chestnut hair which was now greasy and dull and untamed. Her pale ivory skin had gotten even paler, like fresh untouched snow. Her ice blue eyes were uncaringly, unlovingly, unexistingly dim and dark. She looked pale enough to be taken away in a casket and lifeless enough to be buried six feet under. The thought didn't seem unappealing at all.
She reminded herself again that she was not dead, nor dying. Despite her own efforts she lived and breathed and existed.
Resting back against the headboard of the crisp, neat, scratchy hospital bed, she finally allowed herself to relax and loosen. Her mother's random visit had set her on edge, and she hadn't been able to even think of sleep with her mother's cold, dead, malicious green eyes boring into her like laser beams. Now alone, just how she liked it, she relented herself to the nightmares that would be waiting for her just beyond consciousness. The dark bags under her eyes were not new nor surprising to her, a chronic insomniac, but she still silently agreed to herself that a little sleep now and then was what kept her sane enough to function.
As her eyes finally shut, a blissful feeling of relaxation over taking her, she smiled a dizzy smile to herself. Tomorrow was her discharge date. This meant many things, good and bad. The good news was that she was finally free of the sterile and robotic hospital. The bad news was that after her mother had found her half dead and very ready to cross that other half into actual death, she had immediately kicked her out and told her never to come back. And as neutral news, she had just enough money to buy a ferry ticket and have a few hundred G left over. She'd start over, a new life wherever the first ferry she got to was headed.
She reminded herself for the last time before falling asleep that she was not physically dead, nor physically dying. And although inside she was very much post-mortem, perhaps a change of pace would be enough to kick start her still and unfeeling heart?
Author's Note:
Okay, so this chapter is really short. The next ones will be muuuuch longer! This is sort of like a prolouge.
(1) ha·mar·ti·a [ha-mahr-tee-uh]- tragic or fatal flaw
