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.