Monthly Archives: December 2002
Walking home
The walk home on the Thursday night was equally as bad if not worse than the walk to work. Ten minutes from the tram stop to the flat, and I did think about getting down on the floor and dragging myself. (What I need is a skateboard). I should have called J. or just got [...]
Buffy Summers
On the first night I was in here I wiled away the hours thinking about what would be written on my gravestone and whether it would be as good as Buffy Summers: “She saved the world. A lot.” On the second night I decided I was going to start getting better. Last night I had [...]
Canary
Time. The television is broken so we just measure the mornings by routine checks. Get up for breakfast while they change the beds, have our temperatures taken. Have our blood pressure and pulse taken. We listen to the background noise and watch the birds or the white sky. When I get out of hospital, I [...]
Shunting
I’m mad at myself for slapping my calf to make it work. I’d never had a sprain that behaved like that before. I could have fallen down dead. I keep thinking of the girl who died at Heathrow after travelling back from Australia, and how her blood clot shunted out of her calf.
The time
The thing about hospital is the time, and the time is measured in weather. I’m in a tower and the whole vista of the city is spread out beyond the blinds in horizontal stripes. Rain comes and goes, patterns on the glass. Mist comes and goes. Fog. Dark clouds and light clouds. Sheffield is always [...]
The fear
The thing about hospital is the fear. My first night in, I finally start drifting to sleep around two, but I don’t quite get there. Caffeine half-dreams. Every seven minutes, instead of dropping down into sleep, I drop out – jumping like a rabbit, then start drifting and dreaming again. After two hours of drifting [...]
