Content note Mentions serious illness and hospital treatment.
Every Tuesday the same six chairs, the same six windows,
the same pale-green curtain that never quite closes.
We sit like passengers on a slow train
going somewhere none of us bought a ticket for.
The drip ticks. The drip is the clock here.
We measure time in bags, not hours.
Mrs. Kapoor in chair two knits a sweater for a grandson
who isn’t born yet. She says it’s a deadline.
The boy in chair five plays the same game on his phone
and loses, loudly, every fifteen minutes.
I bring a book I never read. I bring a sandwich I don’t eat.
I bring my wife, who reads the book and eats the sandwich.
Nobody says the word. We say treatment, the stuff, my cocktail.
We compare nurses like old men compare cricket players.
Last month chair four was empty, and stayed empty,
and nobody asked, and the nurse moved the plant there.
On the bad days the ceiling is the only landscape.
I have learned every crack. One looks like a river.
On the good days Mrs. Kapoor tells a joke so terrible
the whole ward laughs and the machines beep in protest.
I don’t know which of us will finish the journey.
I know the sweater has one sleeve now. I know it’s blue.
I know that when they unhook me and I stand, unsteady,
the boy in chair five looks up and says same time next week,
and I say same time next week,
as if it were a promise, as if it were that simple —
and for six days, it is.
