Standing there on a chair.

The last time I was in a hospital was to kiss my brand new nephew, his soft hands curled while he started his world in a small maternity ward, lit with primary colours. The time before that was with Evan, where we spent the night in the waiting room. He lay on the floor, his body curled in a wish to fold in his pain. After about seven or eight hours, he was at last let into observance only a short while before the sun came up. I spent the night sitting still in a plastic chair until an unimaginably cheerful morning news program came on the television at four o'clock or so. I share a commonly held distaste for hospitals, with their wishful sterilization of the real parts of a person, the blood and abject leaks and breath. And there is always a clutter along every hallway, of carts and basins, and machines, poles of barely indentifiable occupations that sit beneath poor, pastel coloured landscape paintings. Somewhere in the anaesthetized bowels of a hospital, probably behind doors and doors, where paintings are no longer hung, lay my mother. I always think about what people must be thinking in hospitals. I wonder about the approach of despair that comes out of the pain of their bodies, of their awareness of something broken about themselves beneath their bandages or swimming within their mysterious flesh. I do not think that the stiff sanitary can keep away these thoughts when one closes their eyes.