Hospitals

Hospitals have never really stressed me out.

I know so many people wander down the halls and get the heebie-jeebies.

But for some reason, I’ve always felt comfort in the halls,

Knowing there’s babies being born and people being healed.

The warm neon light over your crummy hospital food.

Well, maybe comfort isn’t the right word.

More like “on-edge, hesitant relief”.

It seems the build-up to the hospital visit has always caused more anxiety for me than the visit itself.

Arriving at the emergency room was always just an acknowledgment of what we have all been

pretending to not exist,

For years, decades, millenniums.

The exhaustion and ignorant joy of throwing your hands in the air, handing the problem to the

professionals, and saying, “I have no clue how to make it any better.”

You think they will. They’re the experts anyway.

So you toss on the grippy socks and open up about the monsters that only arrive at night and

keep the food out and anxiety in.

They sit in you a room with plastic chairs that pull on your hair when you stand up,

Ripping it out of your scalp as you share your deepest turmoil in a room full of strangers.

And then -without any rhyme or reason- they send you home.

Away you go to the same four walls and structure that put you there in the first place.

Your kids look up at you with eyes guarding their true feelings,

And you, you, pretend that the monsters are at bay.