She broke her wrist, I was right there I saw it happen. She broke her wrist and instead of screaming or crying she just kept gasping as if air had lost all oxygen. She looked at me and then her wrist and then she started sobbing. This was the calm part of that day, when my eyes could still see and stay in one place at a time. As she was sobbing everyone rushed around her making a spectacle of it trying to ask her what happened as if she could speak. So stupid, can’t they tell she can barely breathe. So we rushed her to the hospital and I held her in the car, the road was bumpy and with every rock under the wheel she yelped, my father apologized, and I held her harder. She cried quietly now as my eyes darted over the road as if to prepare myself for her pain. Somehow I felt it all, not the pain but the panic. She focused on her pain and I focused on everything else for her.

We got to the hospital and she cried hoping to get help, but she did not. Six hours outside in the cold. We watched the sunset go down, but it was not romantic or relaxing. In fact as it got darker the more adrenaline kicked in. She was barefoot and I offered my shoes several times. She was more than that though, she was alone. She begged her parents to come, they did not. She reached out to her friends for comfort, they laughed. And I sat there, feeling everything for her as she felt the pain, more than physical now. To be abandoned in a time of need, I was there but I am not who she wanted. That is okay-because I was there.

In the dark I saw so much more than one ever sees in day. Outside the hospital as she swayed in and out of a sleep like state due to pain. It had been hours by now. No Advil. My eyes couldn’t sit still, they were restless watching all movements every man a threat, every woman a danger. Scary people reside outside of hospitals at night. Ask the nurses, they know.

A woman was crying, she had a bag with her. And a lot of towels wrapped over her hand. I saw the bag. It was a finger. There was a young man screaming about snakes and other things, obviously on a trip that didn’t go as planned. A boy wheeled in dressed up as if for a play. He was dressed as a skeleton, face painted as he was rolled into the hospital on a gurney. How ironic to enter the hospital as a skeleton. Then there was the dead man.

He deserves his own paragraph. She was asleep at this time. I saw him wheeled out of the hospital on a bed. White hair so thin I could see his scalp. Eyes unfocused set on some unknown point living people cannot see. His mouth slightly open without the care to close it now. It doesn’t matter anymore. No mask but an oxygen tank connected to the bed, except it wasn’t on him. They wheeled him out the front of the hospital, like a show. Look at this man, take bets is he dead or alive? Watch as we bring him outside in the cold. Will he shiver? My eyes followed him until they could no more and then I returned to Surveillance.

She left me. She got the bed and my father got the chair beside it while I sat in my chair outside. 12pm. Then it was just me and my eyes. Me planning which rock to pick up if the strange man at the car that kept staring at me walked over. He didn’t. A nurse came out and told me to sit inside in the waiting room.

There was a teenage boy with his older sister I assumed. He coughed a lot, no mask, this made me nervous. There was a woman with red eyes she coughed. A man of the late forties hung over himself in a wheelchair. He wasn’t coughing. Finally, I was allowed in the room. Vomiting down the hall, the curtain shielded us from a man talking to himself. I watched the time change occur that night. 13 hours of chaos till we got home.