The lights, the packed bag, the double swinging doors, the smell, the waiting room marking the beginning of a wait that would show no mercy. Waiting for you. Waiting for them to wrestle you from me.  The bed, the sitting, take this pill, the WiFi code, the laptop, the film watching, the waiting. The needles, the beeping, the armbands inflating, the fine line between the mundane and the tragic growing ever finer.

The pain, the button, the relief of morphine coursing through your veins to a broken and hardened heart, the vomiting, more needles more drugs more beeps, the slipping of reality from your grasp and waking to a nightmare you could never have dreamed of. As bags of fluid hang above your head dripping life into an increasingly broken body. A protracted tragedy is played out in a theatre for life’s newest arrivals. A place this genre should not know.

When you think you’ve been through the worst.  The stages, the grief, the searing steak knife pain. The heavy heavy anguish, the gasps, the absence of reality, the sudden and effective numbing, the wondering whether you really exist, the wondering why you don’t feel anything, the absence of tears falling down your face, the unfeeling, the twitch in your cheek that you can’t control that’s accompanied by an involuntary vocal squeak. A physical sign of a sneaking suspicion that more might lie beneath.  Waiting to rear its ugly head in every fibre of your body. Forced into a waiting room in the alleys of your mind, the grim reaper of traumatic stress lies in wait. And manifests in the silenced gasps, and roars from your heart. In the destruction of your relationships, in the multiplying anger like bacteria in your soul, in the anxiety, the paranoia, the all consuming hatred that lies within you, of life, of good, of happiness. Post traumatic stress, loss’s legacy  that knows no limit and offers no respite to an already severed soul.