Columns and Shadows
The columns rise like sentinels outside the hospital entrance—tall, cold, and too clean, like the bones of something ancient and uncaring. You step beneath them slowly, each stride heavy with the weight of what-ifs and maybes. The automatic doors hiss open with the sterile indifference of a machine that's seen too many stories pass through—some ending in relief, others in silence.
Inside, the air is dry and smells faintly of antiseptic and old coffee. Shadows stretch long across the waiting room floor as the late afternoon sun filters through high windows, casting the chairs and plastic plants into exaggerated shapes—monsters or angels, depending on your mood.
You hesitate at the threshold. Maybe it’s the pain in your chest, or maybe it’s something less physical, more like memory. The last time you came here, they said the word “serious” more than once. The doctor’s face was composed, but his eyes flickered—just a moment of truth peeking out from beneath his professional mask.
Now you’re back. Maybe for answers. Maybe for the end.
Hope walks beside you, thin and tired but still breathing. Despair trails not far behind, more comfortable here—slinking through corridors like it belongs. You wonder if you’re being overly dramatic, but then again, hospitals are where the soul gets loud. Everything feels sharper here: the cough of a stranger, the beep of a machine, the way a nurse brushes past without seeing you, her scrubs swishing like the wings of some overworked guardian angel.
You sit. The chair groans under your weight, but no one looks. This is a place where people don't stare—where eyes stay on magazines, phones, the floor. Where pain is common currency, and everyone pays in quiet.
A child laughs somewhere down the hallway, and for a moment, the sound cuts through the gloom like sunlight. It’s jarring, that laugh—like a stubborn weed pushing through cracked concrete. It reminds you: life is still happening here, even as death circles, peeking through ICU curtains, riding elevators in silence.
You watch the light on the floor move inch by inch, sliding toward you like time itself, slow and unstoppable. You close your eyes, just for a second.
You breathe in.
Maybe it’s the last time.
Maybe it’s not.
But either way, you walked through those columns, through the shadows. That counts for something.
