Dream

"What am I doing here at the hospital?"
"How long have I been here already, and how much longer?"
" Where was everyone else?"

Those questions haunted me in my dream, in which I saw myself walk around the corridors of the very hospital I am in now. I only managed to sleep two hours or so before mum woke me up from my dream world. But how much more different was it from the real world? Do I not have the same thoughts, do I not see the same brightly lit and lifeless corridors? Do I not have the same questions?

Mum's voice woke me up. She needed help getting up to use the washroom, and I immediately sat up. I held onto her frail body, and lifted her up. I followed behind her and her IV drip-on-wheels. My head was hurting and spinning, images of my dreams were just beginning to gradually fade like images of an aged, yellowing photograph...

I stood outside the washroom door, looked out the window at the silhouette of mountains at night. "Back again... Back here again..." I thought I left the hospital towards the end of January for good... I thought I left the hospital in early March for good, but this visit and this stay may be for a good while. Two weeks, maybe more, depending on the outcome of the impending surgery. Depending on how severe mum's condition is and whether she can recover from yet another invasive procedure, the second one in the span of just three months. Fear and loneliness and death consumed me and swallowed me whole.

I feel like a prisoner of circumstances, a prisoner of dreams and traumatising thoughts. A prisoner waiting for release and liberation is at the mercy of the parole board of life and fate...

And what of mum? A prisoner of her own fragile, painful, deteriorating body, which cannot die quickly enough...?