"No! I won't let this kid die on me. Charge again."

"Sir, there's no point, any higher and it would kill her anyway. We-We've lost her"

A sigh broke the silence that consumed the emergency room. Then, whispered words, almost as though the person speaking did not want them to exist even for the few seconds they hung in the air.

"Time of death; 11.48."

~*~

Ring

It is amazing how, when your phone rings at almost midnight, it always wakes you up from the best of dreams.

Ring
Ring

It is also amazing how, when your phone rings at almost midnight, you know it is extremely good news or extremely bad news.

Ring
Ring
Ring

It is even more amazing how, when your phone rings at almost midnight, you can never find it.

Ri-

"Hello?" I slurred groggily, still half asleep, down the phone.
“Kal? Kal? Is that you?”

The person on the other end sounded agitated, worried, and for the time of night, surprisingly awake.

“It’s my phone. Who else would it be?”
“Oh, yeah, uh, it’s Suzan here, Emelia’s mum.”

Oh I thought. Why the hell was my friends mum calling me in the middle of the night?

It is also amazing how, when your phone rings at almost midnight, you know it is extremely good news or extremely bad news.

Oh. Crap.

“Oh, hi Mrs Matthews, why did you-“ I broke off as a giant yawn made slaves out of my mouth and eyes.
“Yes, now Kal, are you sitting down? This may be quite a shock.”

It is also amazing how, when your phone rings at almost midnight, you know it is extremely good news or extremely bad news.

Oh. Crap. Double Crap.

“Yeah I’m sitting. What is it?” I was worried now.
“Well, you know Emelia was trying that new form of drug?”
“Yeah…”
“She…her…The drug reacted badly with the medication still inside of her and her natural defences”
“What are you trying to say?” I was shaking. And not from the lack of central heating in my house.
“Emelia was taken to the emergency room awhile ago; she had a cardiac arrest.”

I didn’t want to ask. If I asked, then I might receive the answer which was now circling my brain. Some unknown voice was laughing cruelly at me as my heart race increased and I held onto the phone so hard; my fingers were burning with unseen pain.

“Kal, Kal. Emelia died. She-” The voice on the other end of the line wavered and broke into quiet sobs. I could see her tears as my own vision blurred.

That night descended into a hazy memory of salty tears, faceless screams and no hint at all of sleep. I think I might have fainted, I can’t remember. I dropped the phone and screamed, I remember that alright. The rest of the night is just a blank, yearning emptiness. An endless feeling of loss and isolation as you try to cope with the fact that the one thing that kept you within the bounds of sanity has gone forever.

It is also amazing how, when your phone rings at almost midnight, you know it is always extremely bad news.

~*~

The fresh linen felt crisp and cold under my touch as I sat on the edge of the hospital bed.

A sigh.

It seemed like it had only been around a week since I had been here, in this room with Em. When it seemed we both still had most of our lives together at least.

Wait,

How long had it been? I had lost the days and times since I lost her. Each day merged into the next as sorrow overtook me and froze me within a time where I could remember what I had lost.

Whatever; it didn’t matter. I couldn’t get her back.

Laying back on the white hospital pillow and staring at the ceiling, I thought of how Em must have felt, lying here, day after day.

I knew she had been losing herself. The girl I had known since reception had been misplaced amongst pills and white lights for the past year. It was a year at least. For the first months, Em was still her same old self; talking about how she couldn’t wait to get out, craving a KFC and trying to chat up the young male nurses. We had planned our lives after the hospital, dreams growing by the day.

It had been around the fourth or fifth month when it had hit her hardest. She gave up believing. She gave up caring. She gave up living. Her character had faded as quickly as the colour from her skin. She couldn’t be bothered to get up each day, to get dressed. Her favourite clothes lay hidden at the bottom of the cabinet in her room as she favoured the white pyjamas all the condemned descend to.

She grew worse and worse, seeing no point to leading ‘a normal life’. The hardest for me, was seeing her give up her art. She used to live, breath, eat, talk and sleep art. She was never separated from her camera and was always sketching even the finer details of beauty in this world. Her photography slowed down from day one. Yeah, we took some silly photos in her room, things to cheer her up and brighten up her room. But she could never bear taking too many stupid photos, for her passion laid with artist shots.

But how artist could you get with a white building? A plain white building with identical white rooms filled with identical grey people just watching their lives waste away. She took some, and they were the saddest, most emotive photos I have ever seen. Then she gave up completely, asking me to get rid of her camera.

Yes, she asked me to just throw it away.

Her most prized possession.

She had lost herself.

Of course, I didn’t throw it away. It’s at home, sitting on my desk, surrounded by so many photos, watercolours, sketches and chalk pieces Em had done over the short lifetime I had known her.

~*~

“I can’t take it anymore, Kal.”

Her tears were harsh distortions on Em’s face in the strange lights and shadows of the hospital room.

“They don’t know what they are doing here. They’re just filling me with one drug after another and hoping something will work. I just can’t take the hope for another drug and the pain when it doesn’t work.”

She wiped her cheek with the palm of her hand.

“I’m not a guinea pig!”
“I know hun.”

I reached for her hand and found it cold and shaking with fear or rage, I didn’t know. Her hand found mine and she held on tight.

“They just want to stick needles in me, too fill me with drugs until I don’t know who I am anymore. I don’t, Kal! I don’t know who I am!”

Em stopped to draw breath, looking up as if to try to extract her next words right out of the air.

“To make me myself again, then you would need to take away the drugs. But if you took away the drugs, I would die. Funny that isn’t it. To be myself again I must die.”
“Aw, don’t say that hun. You don’t need to die to find yourself.”

~*~

Another sigh.

Lying on a hospital bed gives the greatest feeling of loneliness I have ever known.

Lying there, I heard the squeaky wheel of a drugs trolley go past the door. It stopped at, I guess, the next room to the one I was in. A voice protested to the pills in the same way Em did. Why is it, a single thing can flood your mind with memories you thought you had forgotten? I listened to this unknown protestor a while longer until my curiosity grabbed a hold of my mind and would not let go.

Swinging my legs off of the low bed and onto the floor, I started my way to the door. Looking out of the window in the door, I could see the nurse getting flustered with the still unknown objector.

I opened the door, thinking how I should help the objector, knowing how much Em hated being drugged up. And, if this person truly needed it, the nurse would come back. She always did.

I walked up to the nurse, summoned some courage and said “Excuse me, but I know that you can’t administer medication on this ward whilst the patient has a visitor. Please leave.”

The nurse looked confused.

“You’re? You’re visiting?”

I nodded.

“Him?”

I nodded again, wondering who this ‘him’ was. I still hadn’t seen the protestor. The nurse gave me a curious look then half-shrugged and continued down the corridor and entered the next room.

“Thanks.” I turned to the voice of the protestor and saw a skinny boy around my age standing in the doorway of his room.

“You are welcome. I know how insistent they can be.”
“You an ex-patient? You look too healthy.”

Indeed, I did. Compared to this pale boy who looked like he had aged beyond what was natural. His skin was the same colour all patients were, pale as you could get with a hint of grey.

“No, I was telling the truth when I said I was visiting.”
“But who are you visiting? I know it’s not me.”
“I’m visiting the memory of my best friend. And collecting her things.”

I stared at my feet, trying not to cry again.

“Kal?”
“What?!”

I looked up at him, full of wonder. His face didn’t give anything away.

“Are you Kal? Was your friend Em? The girl in room 116? I’ve been in the room next to her for over 6 months; I think I know who she was.”
“Oh. Yeah I am.”

I felt stupid. And blind with ignorance. During the time Em was in hospital, I was so wrapped up in her, I had completely ignored everything else.

“Yeah. I heard she had died. I’m sorry. She was really nice.”
“You talked to her?”
“Uh, yeah, again, I was next door to her for 6 months.”
“Oh.” I said again.

I had forgotten that there were points that I wasn’t with Em. I was always chucked out the hospital at certain times.

“I talked to her quite often actually. We were the only two around this age. Everyone else is a wrinkly. She’ll be missed, not only by me and you. Even these halls will miss her passion that she fought the meds, her character, her humour. She was a brilliant person.”
“Yeah, maybe for the first months in this place. She lost herself after that.”
“Only because this place took it out of her. And it still remains here within this building.”

I don’t believe in ghosts or that we leave imprints of ourselves in this world when we pass on but I could see what he was getting at. Em’s room had a different feeling to it, compared to the others. You could feel that someone great had been there at some point.

He could clearly see the dawning on my face.

“See, she’s not really gone. She left parts of her heart and soul behind for us, and within us. And for you, in this…”

He wandered back inside his room, crossed the same white lino floor and rummaged in a chest on the opposite wall. I leaned on the doorframe and wondered what the hell he was on about.

“Here.”

He handed me a white envelope with my name written on the front.

“This is Em’s handwriting.”
“Uh-huh”

He was smiling now. That sort of I-Know-A-Secret-That-You’re-Going-To-Love smile.

“Well open it then.”

I turned it over and ripped open the flap. Pulling out the fold of paper inside, something fell to the floor with a loud clink, in the silence of the hospital room.

I bent down and picked it up.

It was a superman logo badge.

“It’s her badge. Heh, she bought it years ago and I wanted it, I remember. She always said she would leave it to me in her will.”

I laughed a hollow laugh, for when she had said that, we thought we were going die old ladies, in the same nursing home.

“Aw that’s sweet.”

I slipped the badge into my pocket along with the envelope. I unfolded the paper. It was a letter from Em. I scanned it quickly, my eyes prickling.

As I reached the last line, a whisper escaped my lips, somehow joint to the tear that rolled down my cheek.

“I love you Em.”

The hardest part of this is leaving you.

~*~~*~