text: I died a long time ago. In a room that has no name, no space left to occupy. But that isn’t quite the truth. No. The space is ever changing, ever full. My footsteps are only loud enough to echo at night, when the sound of the caffeinated night nurses and the beeping heart monitors sing to the stuffy supply closets. The walls and the floors are the same. Can only be the same. Visiting hours are quiet, because there are no visitors. The difference is everyone is a little farther apart. In their shared looks, and the distance between their itching fingers. Where did all the visitors go? They talk and screech from the phones and the computers wheeled in on the carts with meals and Jell-o cups. I think it’s the worst decision I ever made, to have died in a place with no sleep. What sleep there is is fitful and interrupted by all the blue and shuffling of fabric. The nurses mean well in the rooms but not the halls. All the white boards with their scribbled shifts are fun to mess with. The children with the good fortune of a parent or two slumped in the stiff scratchy bedside chairs watch me with eyes like moons. I can tell from the look alone that they’re close, closer than their parents or the doctors or the janitors. Their insides are hollowing out, soul weeping its fluttered experience by the teardrop. I had to have looked the same, at home, at school. Difference was I could breathe. Not every death is soaked in blood or even regret. The kid with the big flashing eyes talks to me. “The granny down the hall died today, didn’t she?” I nod, and it’s enough. “Where is she now?” “Not here.” “I could hear her wheezing.” The kid wraps his arms around himself and shakes. It makes the IV bag swing and slosh. “Bad way to go.” I stand next to his bed, and I take in his round cheeks and the wisps of his brown hair covering his ears and forehead. “Maybe she went home.” “Maybe.” “Will I go home, too?” Lying tastes like the mish-mash of rainbow on a white background, swirling and sparkling. “Maybe.” “Why didn’t you?” I stare up at the ceiling, the way I did when I died, the way everyone does one way or another. I wonder just how many people have terrible memories they can’t escape in the form of a blank ceiling. It’s mute and flat and unforgiving. By the time I look down the kid is gone, and his father puts a hole into the wall next to the white board with the name of the nurse on shift. He’s a man that buried his love too deep, I can see it spilling from his shoulders and his chest in rivers. A death without blood can in fact have regret. I don’t go far from my room. I can’t. I’m not chained to it, or even held in by invisible force fields. It just feels wrong to wander too far down the hall, and see the faces that have nothing to do with me. I have no purpose, no secrets hidden under the easily wiped clean linoleum. Instead I watch from the corner of the room as they wheel the beds in and out. I wonder absentmindedly if this is my punishment. The endless stream of people fighting for a life they want. It’s less a punishment and more like a slap. The old TV across from the bed hums and fizzes like blood and hydrogen peroxide. All 3 channels play at once and I hide the remote around the room so I don’t have to deal with its noise. I try not to stand at the end of the bed or anywhere someone other than a kid can see me. Something about the young makes them far more courageous than the adults. Or maybe I just died too young. While they’re in my room I’m their big sibling and I wonder in the haze of morphine and breathing machines if I had siblings. I wonder if I hurt them. The table by the window has purple hyacinths in a sleek vase, and the moon wilts it’s flowers. I sit at the table while the newest patient attempts to sleep, attempts to dream, attempts to breathe. I get lost in the monotonous wail of the flatlined heart rate monitor.