I hate being here. The girl next to me looks sick and tired and I know I look just like her. Does she wake up in the middle of the night in pain? Are the crooks of her arms scarred by the incessant jabs of needles to take blood and tubes to administer medication? I ask her this with my eyes and hers say yes in return.
The kid in the corner won’t stop screaming, no matter how many times his mom rocks him back and forth in her arms. He’s too small to be here. I hate when they’re here and they’re so young.
I see a boy, maybe nine, I pray he’s nothing like me. I pray that after this visit he’ll take some sort of medication and never come back. I wonder what class he’s missing right now, what sports game, what hang out with friends.
A little girl skips through the hallway, her mom following behind, wiping tears from her face and I want to scream. Why God? Why her? Minutes later, she’s being dragged, crying, into the room where they take blood.
A boy my age sits directly across from me. The pain has taken the light from his eyes and pushed down his shoulders. He says “fine” whenever someone asks him how he’s doing and that’s how I know it’s bad.
I don’t like being here because they are all so much like me. So much pain in one room. We are all so tired. We all wish to be anywhere but here. We all know to roll our sleeves up when they take us back. To slip our shoes off. To uncross our legs so the blood pressure reads right. To push our hair behind our ears to get our temperature taken. Stand tall against the wall before slouching again in pain. Recite our birth dates and our pharmacy. We say and do these things without thinking, we’ve memorized them over time, they’re engraved in our minds.
We all go down these halls and sit uncomfortably on crinkly paper atop a hard table. We make small talk with the nurses and rate our pain on a scale of 1-10. We wait forever and swing our legs back and forth. We move our hands in circles and touch our chins to our chests as instructed.
We’re talked about and talked to. We sit up a little straighter when we hear a knock on the door. We smile as the doctor walks in the room before explaining in detail the suffering we’ve been living since our last visit. We sit on our hands and dig our fingernails into the back of our legs when we’re prescribed something else. Another orange bottle that may or may not do anything at all, a fact that we have to wait anywhere from six weeks to six months to determine. We splash water onto our faces in the bathroom and yell into paper towels. We practice smiling in the mirror before walking out.
We see ourselves in each other. We understand. We wish to be kids, but feel old in these rooms. We never want to come back but we need to be here.
We pay seven dollars in parking and let out the breath we didn’t know we were holding when we make it out of the structure.
***
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Wow. You captured the experience so well and I love the structure you chose. The close observation, the details, the use of “we.”