Hospital Walls

A Story by Kameron Boulton

Hospital walls have heard more prayers than temples. And that night, I prayed more than I had ever prayed in my entire life. I thought God had abandoned me, but I realized, in that emergency room listening to tears falling as steadily as the rain was falling, that I had abandoned him. I just wish it hadn't taken a tragedy for me to realize that.

In the time it took me to hang up the phone, drive to her house, and kick her door in, the drugs had already taken effect. She was foaming at the mouth and convulsing as I carried her down the stairs and put her into the passenger seat of the car. 120 miles per hour feels like 20 when the love of your life is dying in the seat next to you. The argument that caused this downward spiral was elementary and superfluous. A product of jealousy and pent up emotions that were finally released onto the wrong people. Memories that were shattered by the screaming now began to materialize in the young lover's mind as his love's mind was fading as fast as his was racing. His heart acted as a counter to hers, racing as hers slowed.

I ran through the hospital doors faster than I ever thought I could move. The stretcher seemed more like a hearse than a piece of hospital equipment. I sat in the waiting room with the blood from her slashed wrists on my shirt and the necklace I had given her two years before in my hands. Time had stopped and my breathing was the only sound that made it's way into my mind.

I didn't notice the doctor standing in front of me until he put his hand on my shoulder. "I'm sorry, son" he spoke in a somber tone as he delivered the news of the girl's passing onto the boy sitting in the plastic waiting room chair in front of him. She passed on a Thursday morning, 3:24 AM.

Rain fell as she took her final breaths in the hospital room at the end of the hall. His voice resonated in her rapidly darkening mind. The memories came flooding with the Dimethyltryptamine and helped calm her in her final moments. Her last breaths were as soft and sweet as her voice. Overdose had claimed her life as it's own.

She was buried next to her grandmother as her parents, her brother, her niece, and her love watched. The priest spoke of life being a fragile thing that many take for granted. I believe the mind is just as fragile, if not more. The people who seem the strongest only look that way because they wear armor made of the broken pieces of their hearts and dreams. They build walls out of fake smiles and forced laughs. They blind themselves from the world around them with closed door and endless tears. They do these things because they're already fighting a war inside their mind with demons from a personal hell that no one else will ever know. The mind is just as fragile as the heart.