Three thirty am

It’s three thirty in the morning. I sit, as I always do, in the black, hard, plastic chair beside your bed. It’s been so long now, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to lie back in a soft bed and get a real night’s sleep. In any event, the notion of going back to our home, now, by myself, and remembering you, the beautiful life we had together, gives me chills.

Most nights, the nurses will come at about eleven and ask if I’m planning to stay by your side until Doomsday. They always know what the answer is going to be. And I haven’t given up hope. If I lost you, it would be as if I had lost myself, so I cannot leave, I cannot walk out of that door at any moment other than when I absolutely have no choice but to.

I’ve called out to you so many times, I’ve said things that might trigger something, some small thing in your brain, about times we have shared together. Sometimes I do start to realise that maybe I should go home, try to get my life back together, and wait for you to wake up from a bit more of a distance.

It still tortures me, the guilt, the not knowing and wondering. What if I had managed to get out of that emergency meeting at 5.30 which meant my getting home an hour earlier, and therefore had some chance of stopping the intruder. What if I’d chosen a flat on a different floor? Then he never would have even chosen to attempt to burgle our place.

The hospital is in beautiful grounds, surrounded as it is by thick oak forest and in its immediate vicinity are large expansive lawns which more mobile patients get the chance to venture out onto during the day. Every day they come and see me and say why don’t you go outside, stretch your legs, you could use the fresh air, but every day up until now I’ve declined.

Now, though, I am starting to wonder how much I am helping, and how much will you remember of me when you do wake up.

I get up, at last, off my ever-weary hospital chair and walk to the window, looking over the grounds lit by the nightlights outside the building. I need it, need it now, that fresh air, to feel some cool breeze on my face again. I’m such a fixture here that nobody will mind, so I slip out through the side door and walk across the lawn, basking in the wonderful, cool night air. I walk away from the building until I reach a secluded spot where I can lie on the grass and look at the moon and pretend for a moment that I have not a trouble in the world, that I am young again, a brand new fresh book of empty pages.

The doctors and nurses are right. I am achieving nothing by continuously waiting and worrying. Tomorrow I will go home. You need a life to come back to, after all, when you wake up.

I tiptoe back to the main building and in through the side door. A few very-early-morning porters see me and cast me a disparaging look. As I go back up the stairs, I remember the day we first met… I remember the day I asked you to marry me… our deciding to move in together… the early bliss… and then the inevitable problems, my losing my job, the stress that caused us and you then losing our only baby. I blame myself for so much of what has happened that I will never be happy until you wake up and we can try to start again, to actually organise the wedding which we should have had but which was left to flounder due to a mixture of inactivity and the slight distance which had begun to grow between us.

I gather my things and head for the door. All the way down the corridor and out to the taxi, I keep thinking that you will wake up any second, that my leaving will somehow trigger it.

I get in the taxi and tell him to drive somewhere, anywhere, which will be covered by the money I have on me. I’m not going back to that flat. They will find a way to contact me.