Ezekiel

I awoke the next night to a bone curling scream as loud as a crashing train. I had to cover my ears to try and mask the screaming and make it muffled; I got out of my cot and, wrapping the white sheet around my pale body, stood outside my door. Nurses were sprinting down the hall to a patient’s room, a few security guards were following quickly behind.

When they got to the room, the screaming still echoing throughout the building, I heard a gasp. Then, as if time paused, everything became still.

Instinctively, I walked to the room, trying to get a glimpse of whatever it was they were seeing. It was against rules to be in another patient’s room, and punishment was severe, but no one seemed to notice as I walked to the crème door.

“Dear god.” Someone muttered under their breath. They were blocking my view but I managed to see past them.

My stomach churned at the sight.

Her hands were dripping a scarlet red; the flesh of her fingertips covered in slivers, looking like a hundred paper cuts on each tip.

I noticed her hands first and when I saw her face I had to close my eyes.

Suddenly, the rusty smell of her blood encased my nostrils and I fled from her room, sickened.

“The ambulance is on their way.” I heard.

And the moment of time frozen caught back up to me as the guards yelled for someone to call the child’s parents.

There was so much blood.

Time flew by as they placed the girl on a stretcher and wheeled her past me. I wanted to be frightened but what I felt most was apathy. Her mocha brown eyes focused on my green ones and she held onto that moment if only for a couple seconds before being carefully placed into the car and sped off to the hospital where doctors will perform hours upon hours of surgery to heal her wounds.

For once it wasn’t about me; it was about the poor girl who so badly wanted a relief from her turmoil here on earth as to try to end her life. And in her mind the only was out was to stick those ragged pieces of glass down her throat and hope for the pain to end.

Avery rushed up to me about an hour after the girl was taken away, hair disheveled and eyes astray.

“Ezekiel, what are you doing up this time of hour?” He asked.

“Will she make it?”

A simple question escaped my lips, and suddenly I didn’t want the answer. I didn’t deserve to know because she was of no concern to me, nor was she? Because in that one instant I had seen into her life and known that she was worth saving, a soul worth living. She came here for a reason, as did I.

What was that reason?

Will I ever get to find out?

“I… I don’t know.” He responded barely a whisper.

I nodded and closed the door to my room silently.

The chilled air kept me up the rest of the night, but it wasn’t the reason for the lack of dreaming. It was for knowing that while one may have problems that don’t mean that they are any more or less important than others.

While I was steadily trying to sleep away my pain, that one girl chose to try to end hers. Isn’t it wonderful, in a mournful sense of way, how ones pain can go unnoticed for so long, I’ve never even seen the girl until tonight? How tragic is it that this very instant someone is crying out in agony ready to hurt themselves for a simple need to be gone, to feel numb.

There was so much blood.

Bu the physical pain wasn’t as troubling as the emotional.

So while I lay in this cot, I thought of her surviving this. So I can meet her formally someday and apologize for all the fear and pain she shouldn’t be bearing.

Someday, she’ll no longer be miserable. She’ll be ecstatic in joy.