It's Still Life

The Alcove #3

Strikethrough

Salisbury District Hospital; Wednesday; rain crawls  streaks  down the sky window; TV on mute the TV mutters silently; the medicine trolley rattles  in the hallway  beyond the door; my tea cools beside his cloudy juice; he says everything the air tastes metallic of foil; the oximeter pops slips from his finger; alarms set the room complaining, and oh how we laugh.

He had blood yesterday and calls himself “topped up”, smiling as though somebody wheeled him to a petrol pump, fitted a hose, and sent him back with enough in the tank for another hundred miles  distance.

Our lives first touched half a world away and somehow kept finding one another for more than thirty-five years; now there is only this chair beside his bed, and the peculiar steadiness that comes when someone you deeply care about love is ill and there is nothing useful to do except remain.

“Thirty plus years,” I say, and the number feels too small for all it contains: “a friendship that outlasts countries, careers, years — even fear.”

He nods and says, “It all comes down to sitting beside someone when it matters.”

I exhale the hour and set my pen down; Aurelia blooms into the alcove seat beside me … “Le’me see what you cut,” so I hold the journal open beneath my hand and slide it towards her: “Have a go, revise, and search for a truer word….”

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