Young Writers Society

There’s no going back from where I am now. The black ink smeared over the paper. I’m not listening to anything he says, and all I say is, “Yes.” and the only gesture that comes to me is nodding my head up and down. I don’t need to hear this speech. I already know where this road is taking me. My eyes glaze over the asphalt on the ground and I wonder what’s beneath. I wonder what this is at the heart. It’s like a caramel apple, a trick to make you eat healthier, but it isn’t healthy. What’s at the core of the apple? I don’t quite know, but it’s the part that nobody eats.

I already know what I’ll see. “Where I am. This is where I want to be.” I say to the man. His cold eyes look over me once more before I am accepted. I don’t know if I want to be here. But I don’t know if I want to be anywhere. It’s too late anyway. The man hands me the badge and I put it on my chest. It says I won’t be here forever. It says I’ll have to go somewhere else after this.

I open the door to their room with the key I was given. “Who are you?” the doctor asks. “We’ve been told there were no visitors.”

“I guess I’m a surprise visitor.” I see them, they're unconscious. I realize why they had to leave me there. There in the sound of gunshots and yelling of commands. The ones I did not listen to. The ones that cost you the rest of your years. I’m the poison ivy that we learned in camp not to touch, the poison ivy we learned to identify, but you still touched me. I can see why you had to leave now. How you had to leave the battlefield, but you didn’t get to. How I had to carry your body out of it.

D.C. sleeps alone tonight. Safe and sound because of us. It cost lives. Lives like the vending machines we ate out of, and we’re coins that under the asphalt, under all of this ground, no one will care. Care that some were buried under the gritty soil. The only ones that understood us all were each other. No one else exactly knew what it was like out there.

The doctor’s footsteps clicked out of the room. And in the silence, I hope they would wake up. Minutes pass as I sit in the shiny chair beside what is likely to be your death bed. The doctor came back in eventually, to look at the monitor and go back out. To make sure they were still breathing the clean hospital air that reeked of death. There were ones that we couldn’t save. The ones that slipped through our hands and we couldn’t do anything about it. This was the place full of people that had passed. The people that doctors had to watch over. People like ice. Ice that melted in their hand and became water. The water that soaked my sleeves. I wasn’t a doctor for that reason. But it was still me who was the one watching you melt in my own hands. And I was melting with you. Our bond had gotten thinner and thinner out of the ice.

We might’ve not had a bond at all anymore while you were unconscious, because that meant you didn’t have to think of me. The lights from outside the window went out.

Their body might’ve been there, fighting, but they weren’t. And the doctor that kept coming in and out, checking on them, she didn’t seem there.

When I hear the long, continuous, beep of the monitor, I realize why I was the one worth leaving.