Sick

The drastic scoreline shredded any hopes for the outcome.

I left early, behind me

my empty seat and an absence of cheer,

walked halfway home, remembered you weren’t there,

so walked to the shoreline but still felt that something missing

so kept walking,

until you felt near.

Stuck on the wrong side of the hospital door,

I wait for the nurse to buzz me in.

She does so with familiarity towards this awkward gesture,

forced smiles and awkward greetings like worlds don’t end here daily.

Her day was good, she says.

A winding hallway leads me through this shining white labyrinth, dragged, magnetised.

Your room was recently sanitised, the

chemical smell burning in widening nostrils,

the hallways, now behind, and distanced by a door,

feel empty and haunted

but the barrage of square-wheeled trolleys and

light Skechers footsteps filled with bruising feet

make it seem more likely that there’s a circus just outside.

Your withered form lays there, eyes vacant,

body unmoving.

You’ve been in absent minded for weeks now, and each day hope dies its own slow death in this room, suffocating.

Each day the cold carries me home through the streets’ wild cacophonies —

the buzzing of drills, passing cars, reversing trucks and distant dogs yapping, starving —

I prepare fast meals with the microwave, the beeping stirring my sleepwalking body, a candle burning to try to shift the smell

and forget.

The TV lulls me into a brief sleep. Still up at dawn, watching the black sky slip into its jaundiced yellow form and then its pale blue, your gasping veins reflected in its softening hue. And the thick, sticky tarmac pulls me back here again, though I kick and scream inside, hands trembling walking through the door, walking

back to your bedside where I watch your spirit dwindle, watch your soul edge along, a couple of steps closer to home,

feel the distance between us grow, grow,

grow, unable to grasp at

what you were only a few weeks ago.

Half asleep, I grab for the remote, I turn on the TV

and the same game is still playing

5–1 deficit, and still 20 minutes left,

glad I left early,

my empty seat hanging on

to the corner of the frame

white-knuckled even as the camera shakes,

even as it moves freely.

Falsely absorbed, acting like I can’t hear

your laboured wheezing,

pretending not to see your shadow out of the corner of my eye,

dancing in its stillness on the off-white wall,

deceptive a final time, knowing what comes for you,

knowing it’ll reach me too,

something sinking in the stomach’s pit

that I try not to believe in,

my future played out a mere metre away

my mind moving, at a glacial pace,

away from itself, away from my aching,

decaying shell.