The Waiting Room

I sit here in the hospital waiting room,
pondering platitudes, since I have nothing better to do.
Perhaps the best way to become friends with time is to decide it doesn’t exist.
Maybe the best way to conquer fear is to sit in silence with it.

When you don’t feel the grief, it haunts you at your happiest.
but if you decide to face it, you enable yourself at your lowest.
I bob my knee up and down in the hospital waiting room,
And observe the freezing blizzards as they continue to loom.

I keep them at a distance through sheer good luck.
Poison ivy disguised as a rose waits patiently to be plucked.
I’m supposed to be the master of stoicism by now.
But I would be crying every day if I were allowed.

Out there I embody a manic wise woman.
Everything you’ve learned must be unlearned, I tell them.
But here, in the hospital waiting room, I remember who I used to be.
Wide-eyed, terrified, nobody expecting things from me.

Some days I am filled with gratitude for surviving,
But those who died as victims plant seeds of guilt deep in my being.
Why do I get to sit here in this hospital, waiting,
While they had to bear the crippling burden of prematurely leaving?

I wait for another trophy from my damaged destiny.
Sitting here on this hospital bed, the paradoxes of pain still puzzle me.
I twist them around like a Rubik’s cube every night,
Trying to turn all my life’s wrongs into rights.

*Artwork in cover photo is original art by the author, Shreya Athalye