Please sit next to me, she said.
I could do with some company.
It’s the sound of the voice that I miss more
please do talk to me, she begged,
her voice, a dry rasp against the sterile air,
held a tremor that tugged at my heart.
Her fingers, like gnarled branches,
gripped the chipped cup by her bedside.
Her face, etched with the map of a run-down life,
impossibly ancient under the harsh fluorescent lights.
A cough, a dry rasp in the sterile air,
a weathered symphony of time and pain’s embrace.
I’d never saw her before, in this place,
a panorama of buzzing drunken chaos,
she was an island of stillness.
The others, vibrant and noisy, swearing and shouting
were separated from her by an invisible gulf of tears.
In this place, where pity often meant absence,
she was an anomaly.
A strange mix of emotions washed over me,
shame, unease, a flicker of morbid curiosity.
Here she was, perched precariously on the edge of life,
and the spectre of death hung heavy in the air.
It wasn’t a violent demise she feared, but a silent one,
a fading away with no human connection to anchor her.
She didn’t speak again,
her gaze fixed on some unseen point beyond the skylight.
Instead, she raised the bottle to her lips once more,
draining the poisonous amber liquid within.
Each deliberate sip felt like a final act,
a desperate clinging to the so few vestiges of her life.
Thanos' Pulp Fiction 