defect

Walking down the corridor of the fifth floor of the Hope Hospital: white walls, gray door, white pills, gray jar, white moon, black floor. He’s gotta make it to the end and then smoke a cigarette. His job is to give hope to those sentenced to suffer. He can hear a patient’s moan from afar, surgeons set his broken bone. An ambulance arrived a little earlier: it was an enamoured nineteen-years-old girl who found happiness in a razor’s edge. “A pill to make you numb, a pill to make you dumb, a pill to make you anybody else, but all the drugs in this world, won’t save her from herself” comes to his mind. He just can’t get rid of that song anymore.The grand corridor… hospital smell drifts in the air, emphasizing people’s pain.He’s saving lives and fixing peoples hearts but not his own. Emergencies and accidents and ambulances are his oxygen, and people are his blood and corridors his veins and every day is just the same, paramedics and pain. The poetry in him is lost: “you’re born, you live, you die, that’s all that he can see from here, you’ve got a date with me, could be tonight, it could be years.”He enters rooms occupied by those about to die, his sleep is troubled by men’s cries for help:- I don’t wanna die before my time, already used eight of my lives.- Be calm, please lay back, we will help you rest for a while.- Be calm, take this pill, it will help you rest for a while.There’s a man in the traffic bellow. He`s stuck with nowhere to go. He`s cursing and swearing and watching the rain drops roll, roll down his windshield. He`s stuck in rush hour traffic and he`s saying “Oh I should have bought that farm in the country. I would have been home by now. I would have been milkin` cows and feedin` pigs and sayin` benign things to my benign wife instead of sittin` here starin` up the tail-pipe of someone I do not even know and probably wouldn`t like. And lookin` up at the face at the end of the fifth floor of the Hope Hospital lookin` out at the goddamn rain like it`s the sweetest thing that he`s ever seen.”When he gets to the end of the corridor he will look out at the traffic below and he will smile sort of sweetly and tilt his head and everyone will look up and think that he’s looking out at the rain as if it`s the sweetest thing he has ever seen.