To Recover
I / Insani
I’d be better by tomorrow morning. I had to be.
I wasn’t sure I would be able to manage another day of my limbs aching and invisibly bruised. That I could survive feeling my battered and frail body be torn to shreds, atom by atom in order to be scattered into the howling winds of a winter night and carried unceremoniously to the four corners of the world.
I wasn’t better the next morning or the morning after that.
I realised too late that I had been mistaken in letting myself be taken to that place. The doctors and nurses, with smiles painted on like clowns from a fairground in a faded and tatty memory, they weren’t trying to help. Their aim was not to pick me up and fix my broken pieces, not to sooth the burn that having my trust in humanity disintegrate left behind. No, they were the scientists turned puppet masters controlling my feeble body for some experiment. They didn’t help, but they didn’t worsen the torment. They left me in a perpetual state of agony, unable to sleep for the screams that were ripped from my chapped lips.
The pain didn’t leave me. It stayed embedded within me, constantly agonising me for every hour I was forced to stay bedridden. It never went away. It never strayed past those four walls that enclosed me.
And neither did I.