Hospital ~daze~ Poem by Samiha Issacs

The mournful prediction and sickly aroma of cologne and soap filled the gloomy waiting room atmosphere. A CAUTIOUS sign stood across from glance, on the slippery floor of the hospital steps. I sat in anticipation and waited, waited for an answer, or so I thought. As I stepped into the next waiting room with patients preparing to go into OR, tears suddenly and slowly filled my eyes as I stood in front of the patients with antidotes of, “you’re going to be just fine”, gestures. The elderly couples sat side by side, as if they were to end this impatient wait together. I saw the intensity in the patients’ eyes, cautious and fearful, yet calming and somehow cheerful. You can tell death has past here, yet others fail to notice. I saw one’s face, cold and fiery with the knowledge of their fate. Why are they here? What are they? Grandparents, children, parents, siblings...
Yet one waits beside these relations, just one individual. The one who would witness their pain, the one who would cry staring into their delirious eyes, the one who would wait. And I just could not believe that past these small rooms of pain and sufferance, are people with an entire life past them. With family and friends whom have no intension of their sickness. A plastic bag filled with the life of water, feeds the patients drip by drip…vain by vain. How they silently drift off to sleep with the intension of unknown shadows hovering their drug-struck body. Yet they sleep. I noticed the sympathetic carpet lurking beneath casual dull chairs perfectly aligned, as if it meant anything special. Oh, they are organized. Elderly family members slept in dreams of hope, for the sanity and life of their persons in individual rooms. Floors and floors of people had these same thoughts. I couldn’t help but wonder of the people who sat there before, who were ill before them, who sat in these dull chairs, and of whom smoked these cautious infernos. Who had lived, who died, how many beautiful newborns, how many survived, how many cried, in pain, in joy, and in loss. There are no other explanations to these broad, bazaar thoughts, but patience. What it does to people; how many pondered of these answers, questions flooding my mind, and how I envy them. But with the lack of no notion of what may occur in these walls of suspense, what are we to do? Though these surroundings were plain and vague, of gray and faint decors, nothing will come of change anyway, so why care. Minutes pass by, hours drift away…still nothing. Some patients stare out into nothing, as if they will never see the world again. Seasons may change; winter to spring, but there is no longer a concern for it. Just the new, better place they will travel to in sleep; and open their eyes in an entirely new surrounding, while others pour themselves with the tears that break their patience. They now understand what their calming drift of thoughts lead to, why they were here to begin with. Their sobs and screams outcast the pain that takes their soul; and leaves only what is left of it, a body…simply, destruction. The destruction and deliberation of one’s heart and being. What one may feel when experiencing this? Devastation, in the hands of an outcast. A patient, a friend, a culprit. What’s left now is….a destiny of unanswered questions.