[half of it written a couple of weeks back]
Screams and dreams make the space i now occupy. A little room shoved away from reality, and yet, experiencing a harsh reality of its own. The Intensive Care Unit Waiting Room is often witness to relentless waiting, occasional break-downs of bystanders, and less often, signs of relief, smiles, and little jokes shared to ease the tension, ripple the deadly calm whilst fear reigns within.
People come, people go. New faces, old faces, beautiful faces, tired faces, all in silent anticipation of the result of a dear one's fight against the dying of light. Hope, and despair. Desperate belief. And some others in cold acceptance. People inside an adjacent clinical and lab-like space are kept alive by machines of human creation; life, the sheer will to survive.
Meanwhile, a worry quickly pushed aside for its septitude is that of the ticking money counter. ICU, ventilator, dialysis, constant monitoring, top-of-the-line doctors and care, lab analytics... Urea-Creatinine, Thrombin-Prothrombin, Creatine Kinase, Reactive C Protein, platlet count... Thirty thousand a day, a thousand two-fifty an hour, twenty a minute. Money for life. Service for life. Institutions with opportunities for service and profit, for life.
Life? A minor cosmic accident? The universe's consciousness of itself?
Consciousness? A mere accidental product/property/emergence of some bosons, quarks and leptons, forming atoms, forming molecules, forming hydrocarbons, forming proteins, forming cells, connecting with each other, creating a network, with Sodium and Potassium gateways giving out electrical blips?
Sadness, love? The natural selection of humans to ensure parents long for children, and vice-verse, ensuring survival and making us the fittest?
Are we to live our lives eating, drinking, sleeping, excreting (i.e. metabolising), having sex, creating offspring, caring for them, so that they can eat, drink, sleep, excrete, have sex, create offspring, care for them, so that they in turn can eat drink, sleep...?
Meanwhile, the life we were sentinels for slowly slipped away; into peaceness, or nothingness. i mourn for you, our dear little sister.
Screams and dreams make the space i now occupy. A little room shoved away from reality, and yet, experiencing a harsh reality of its own. The Intensive Care Unit Waiting Room is often witness to relentless waiting, occasional break-downs of bystanders, and less often, signs of relief, smiles, and little jokes shared to ease the tension, ripple the deadly calm whilst fear reigns within.
People come, people go. New faces, old faces, beautiful faces, tired faces, all in silent anticipation of the result of a dear one's fight against the dying of light. Hope, and despair. Desperate belief. And some others in cold acceptance. People inside an adjacent clinical and lab-like space are kept alive by machines of human creation; life, the sheer will to survive.
Meanwhile, a worry quickly pushed aside for its septitude is that of the ticking money counter. ICU, ventilator, dialysis, constant monitoring, top-of-the-line doctors and care, lab analytics... Urea-Creatinine, Thrombin-Prothrombin, Creatine Kinase, Reactive C Protein, platlet count... Thirty thousand a day, a thousand two-fifty an hour, twenty a minute. Money for life. Service for life. Institutions with opportunities for service and profit, for life.
Life? A minor cosmic accident? The universe's consciousness of itself?
Consciousness? A mere accidental product/property/emergence of some bosons, quarks and leptons, forming atoms, forming molecules, forming hydrocarbons, forming proteins, forming cells, connecting with each other, creating a network, with Sodium and Potassium gateways giving out electrical blips?
Sadness, love? The natural selection of humans to ensure parents long for children, and vice-verse, ensuring survival and making us the fittest?
Are we to live our lives eating, drinking, sleeping, excreting (i.e. metabolising), having sex, creating offspring, caring for them, so that they can eat, drink, sleep, excrete, have sex, create offspring, care for them, so that they in turn can eat drink, sleep...?
Meanwhile, the life we were sentinels for slowly slipped away; into peaceness, or nothingness. i mourn for you, our dear little sister.
No comments:
Post a Comment