Liquid Band-Aids:

What could have been elegant wooden doors are dissected by glaring, fluorescent, yellow paint. What could have been a beautiful picture of life is taunted by gaudy floral wallpaper. What could have been a window is merely a portal through which tinted sunlight penetrates. Even the magazines are strategically placed in columns, as if they must be in perfect working order to survive, aligned side by side to cover the seams which show the tables lack of solidity. The room is full of lines, as only a scalpel could have made, lines a surgeon’s hand could have carefully cut with precision. The lines are straight and trenchant, angled horizontally and vertically, never changing course. From a distance these lines are perfect, unwavering testimonials that everything is working. Upon closer inspection, the baseboard’s rubber is perforated, the picture frame is fractured, and the lights have imprisoned and asphyxiated a fly which now lays collapsed upon itself. The stacks of untouched blankets are packed in the corner, row after row of material, aligned with row after row of stainless steel shelving. The blanket’s threads, running in sutured lines, are a pitiable attempt to coerce someone into thinking this is a home and therefore safe.

The chairs are lined up, side by side, too close for comfort. While the cushions welcome the worry, the stress and the pain, the metal legs slice vertically down from the curved seats and demand reality as they cut harshly to the ground. The sole window, a potential bearer of light, is encased with plastic blinds, which lay neatly one over another, like a liquid band-aid. The air smells sterile, and every breath exhaled hangs in space, waiting, along with the minds and hearts of those who are waiting. Waiting, endlessly, for those masked faces which never bear good news. Even if those words, “we are happy to say,” are uttered, the truth remains, told by the magazines covering the seams: what is broken is never truly healed.

Cold linoleum floors absorb the sound of footsteps and transforms it into high pitched screeches and subsequent slaps. The sole exception is the moment when codes pierce through the air and sting the ears, and one can hear urgent footsteps, not slapping, but pounding their way toward the alarm. This pounding of rubber against the ground is more hopeful and easier to accept than the sounds of routine movement. All of this motion, the motion of life itself, is contained beyond yet another set of doors. This time the doors have windows, set directly above most people’s line of sight. What image you can see through them is crisscrossed and blurred. The only transferred view is of trumpeting lights, the same type that decorates police vehicles and evokes joy from small children. From the waiting room, those glittering lights appear grotesque. However, all of this motion remains unreachable.

What waits on this side of the doors, closed off from the life-filled world of pounding feet and pulsing lights, seems more necrotic and haunting. The waiting room is supposedly a place of being, where people live without questioning life, yet we are mocked by everything around us. Diagrams on the walls do not explain anything of importance. A large “pain scale” poster sits low on the wall. The faces are two-dimensional, failing to capture the slightest essence of emotion. The words “mild,” “moderate” and “severe,” which once had identifiable meanings, are now pointless letter arrangements and exercises in relativity. Portraits of existence are merely flat pieces of paper “decorating” the walls, and dust is composed in small rolling hills along the edges. The bright petals, captured in photographs, are faded, as though the ink grew tired of such a bloodless duty. The thousand words contained in each picture are now merely skeletons, flesh burned away by years of fluorescent lighting. The walls, the floor, the chairs, the artless smiley faces try to convince those who are waiting that there is something beyond this room. Eventually, this room will be forgotten, a distant memory, and no relic will haunt the person who has passed through the ominous doors that separate those who are waiting from those who are experiencing the motions of being pieced back together.

I have been to this waiting room. This place, an imitation of a “home,” is repellent, yet people stay, waiting for any glimpse of a beloved face which will re-awaken their sullen eyes and release their cyanotic hands from their deathly constriction on prayer books. Beyond this place, air is forced into lungs, blood is forced into collapsed arteries, and cardiac muscles are electrically shocked back to life. I have waited for children to leave on respirators, arteries to be held open with wire-meshed stents, and cardiac infarctions to leave decaying tissue behind. Any odd beauty which can be found is a deception, a mesmerizing whisper which traps the mind. Any reality which can be found is carefully cloaked with hope, which desperate minds want to believe in. A shattered bone, a ragged gash, or a broken heart is never truly remedied. In this waiting room of trickery, while anticipating that bones will be mended, gashes will be closed and hearts will be re-assembled, we are willing to believe the lie that broken bodies and minds can be fixed.

--Amanda