Stuck In Yesterday

Content warning: This story contains themes of grief, hospitalisation and emotional distress.

The waiting room of the hospital never stopped feeling like yesterday. They told me to wait, so I never left. That leather chair is now stitched with my name on it, “Heather”. My foot is cramping, and my eyes have forgotten how to see what's in front of them, lost in a moment that never learned how to end. I don't care about the rumbles on my stomach, or the bugs crawling up my legs, as if I were a dead body. The days keep getting longer, the morning sunlight keeps vanishing as my curtains remain closed, day-by-day. Healing instantly became a routine, instead of becoming progress. I stopped asking myself is tomorrow would feel different because I already knew the answer to that question. Tomorrow looked exactly like yesterday and yesterday had looked exactly like the day before. Eventually, I stopped counting days altogether.

The clock above the panel loses five minutes every Thursday. I never mentioned it, because it comforted me to know that there were other things broken in that place. Sometimes my mind drags me back to that afternoon. I still keep hearing, faded in the background, “Mrs. Heather Porsch, the doctor must speak with you urgently”. The lights flicker as I walk across the room and see my sister, in a coma, eyes closed, almost dying. But I have stopped waiting for the news, and I stopped listening to it. I, then, realised, some people are gone because they leave and others because life takes them first. And at that moment, the clock stopped ticking, and time refused to move. I was stuck in a loop of the day, the day where everything went numb and stayed that way.

I go home in a taxi, with a driver who seemed more interested in looking at me through the rearview mirror, than actually driving. Every morning the routine continues to be the same, returning to the hospital. It feels irrational and confusing to understand why I keep doing it, but some things don't need to make sense to happen anyway. Except today, the driver took me on a different route to get to the hospital. "I'm simply avoiding traffic", he said, before I had the chance to ask.

My fingers pressed tightly around the strap of my bag. "Could you go the usual way?"

He looked at me through the mirror, "It'll only take another minute."

"Please."

He first hesitated, but then went back onto the road we always took. I spent the rest of the drive staring outside the window, watching the same "Horizon" bakery, the same bus stop, the same sidewalk. Only then my breathing began to slow down. Once something becomes part of the last days you shared with someone, changing it feels a little like losing them all over again. That inability took over most of my days, where a single red light, which hadn't appeared for us in the previous day, turned into a reason for a fight.

Sometimes it all catches up to me because grief isn't a temporary emotion that arrives and leaves when it's finished. When the cut is open, it takes the thread and needle and throws it across continents, when you have no condition to travel and pick it up. But most importantly, it takes your hand and carves its initial with a knife, when your skin and body can't sustain pain.

The lights go out and I find myself curled up in the corner, too afraid to stand up and look for the switch. So it takes over me, for days, for months, and when the beacon of light is found in the crack of the window, I stand up. But the heavy rain wets my hair, my clothes, my soul. It is as if it's playing a game where every moment of hope becomes a even sadder tragedy than it was before, like it is foolish to believe in it once more, when I realize what awaits me after. That is what grief feels like, and in every corner I turn, I remember her, and I remember the loss of light and continuous darkness.

The nurse never asked why I kept coming back. She would smile at me from afar, still asking if I wanted to order water or some chamomile tea. We talked, but almost never through words. Mostly, through nods. 8:02 am, on the dot, almost every morning she would arrive. One morning, I arrived at 8:10am, and went to "my" chair, to then notice a cup of tea sitting there, on the countertop with a note written: "For Heather". She noticed things about me that I never said out loud, in a way no one else did. I don't know why but it felt strange to be noticed that way. Unfamiliar, but not bad. She looked like she wanted to say something at times, but would hesitate, throw her shoulders back, and walk away. The room lighting seemed more stable, no longer flickering like it usually did when nurse Jasmine was there. And as I make my way to the car, just like every single night, I feel those streetlamps staring at me, as if they were mocking me, like I was still hoping for something I shouldn't be. But every morning I saw Nurse Jasmine, I remembered what it felt like before all of this had happened, before I got stuck in the own loss of my own sister.

One afternoon she found me staring at those lights twitching.

"Oh! I've been meaning to ask maintenance to replace that”

“Don't”, I replied. “I think…I think I'd miss it”. She nodded as though what I had just said, made perfect sense.

“Tell me about her”. I looked at the tea in my hands, the steam, at everything except Jasmine.

But then I finally whispered, "My sister is a patient here. Sorry, I mean, she was a patient here". The words felt so strange as they left me, like I hadn't talked about her in a long time. "She couldn't stand being anywhere where the curtains were closed. Every morning she'd fling them open and say, that the world was still there, and that I just had to let it in.” I smiled before I realized I was smiling.

Jasmine nodded and asked for her name.

I hesitated, "Gabriela", I said. And for a moment it felt like my grief learned how to speak instead of scream.

And after that I didn't notice the clock the same way I did before. It still ticked, but it didn't feel like I was counting something I was trapped inside. The waiting room remained the waiting room, and I still came back every day to the hospital. Not because I was waiting for anything anymore but because I didn't know how to stop. The chair still felt like mine, but it no longer kept holding me in place every day. Nurse Jasmine still arrived at 8:02 most mornings, she smiled the same way and left the tea without asking. One morning, I realized I had stopped staring at the flickering lights as I walked by. I didn't even remember when it stopped bothering me. It was still there, imperfect, but I wasn't waiting for it to change anymore.

Maybe that was the problem all along. I had spent so long believing healing meant forgetting, that if I walked away from that waiting room, I would somehow be leaving Gabi behind. So I stayed, day after day. I let grief constantly convince me that standing still was another way of loving her, but grief became a prison built from my memories. Jasmine never told me to move on, she never told me that everything would be okay, she simply reminded me, through small acts of kindness, that life had never stopped asking me to live it. For the first time, I understood that walking away from the waiting room didn't mean walking away from my sister. The hospital had become the last place where I felt close to her, because she had never belonged to those walls. She belonged in the stories of us together and habits I inherited from her and parts of me that she helped shape long before the hospital room.

When I stood to leave that afternoon, I paused at the door and looked back one last time. The waiting room hadn't changed, same chairs, same clock, same lights. Only I had. Outside, the sunlight splashed across the entire pavement, it wasn't brighter than it had been yesterday, I had simply opened the curtains.