Hospital walls towered over me like a vault
too large to comprehend, and I stood there,
small and insignificant,
trying to grasp the weight of its closing door.
The sterile air bled through my skin a cold draft
of debts I couldn’t pay each visit a withdrawal
a slow drain of everything I had-
emotions reduced to balances on a ledger,
the quiet screams I couldn’t afford to voice.
They poked and prodded,
trading in tests and scans like the most worthless of coins,
exchanging pieces of us for answers that never arrived,
while I remained a spectator, standing outside,
watching hope become a currency too high to exchange.
The waiting room, a vault of silence, held everything fragile—
the kind of fragile that could shatter at any time,
as though we had entered a market with no price tag
and were told to pay whatever we had.
I learned what it meant to grow up too soon,
to face the truth that the world is broken,
and no matter how many tears I shed,
the system never even blinked.
I didn’t know which was worse—
seeing you in pain,
or feeling powerless,
unable to understand why I couldn’t help.
They told us to stay hopeful,
but hope felt like a currency we couldn’t afford.
I learned to stay quiet,
to swallow questions that burned like acid in my throat.
I learned to smile when you smiled,
to pretend the fear in your eyes wasn’t mirrored in my own.
I watched you suffer,
and somehow it felt like I was being broken too,
shattered by the weight of a system that couldn’t see us,
that didn’t know us,
that didn’t even care about us.
Every day,
a little piece of me shattered—
not only from the pain you endured,
but from the suffocating helplessness
that gripped me,
Silent, and relentless.
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