heart monitors-dreamnotfound

seven

"Ew, what the hell," Quackity said with a disgusted look on his face. "This pizza tastes like cardboard," he gave a disapproving glance at the plate below him.

"It's not that bad," Sapnap claimed, taking a sip out of his water bottle. "It beats having to run around the hospital and watch the laundry."

Karl nodded in agreement before looking up. "Our shifts are kind of different, though," he said, gesturing to Dream. "Jealous."

"It's your fault for running over that mailbox in the first place," Bad laughed.

"Not my fault that Quackity's headlights were broken!" Sapnap argued.

They kept bickering for a couple of minutes while Dream poked at his food - a sad looking carton of salad and two stale slices of toast.

He noted that they did this a lot. Throwing half-hearted insults and 'your mom' jokes were practically imprinted on their daily agendas for some reason. At first, he was mortified that they might end the friendship and break apart, but they never did.

They were probably used to it by now.

—————

The hospital seemed like a prison. It wasn't a game of getting better and fully healing, it was a game of waiting. Waiting for the day you could finally declare that you were full of the confinement bullshit and move on with your life.

To move on with meeting new people, learning new things, and creating relationships.

That was George's definition of living.

Accept the prisoners in the jail cells knew when they were going to let out. Or some people didn't know if they were going to see the light of day again. At least it gave them closure.

Hospital patients were the same. They knew the vague description of when they are free to go. When to get their braces off, the time of their next appointment, and so much more.

Others weren't as lucky.

People who knew that they weren't going to be here for longer. They knew that they were just bodies who were soon going to have a white sheet pulled over their faces, shielding them from the reality and harshness of this world.

But the reality of it was well, the basic reason of why it's called 'realism.'

The regular prisoners ticked off the days on the calendar, or maybe they did the things that always showed up in the Sunday cartoons. The messily drawn etchings on the walls that symbolized the days that had passed.

George was sure that he could fill up his whole wall with those small tick-mark carvings. Days, weeks, months passed without ever keeping track of the slow-moving time that seemed to drown him.

The previous hours seemed distant, yet near. The last years were like history, but felt like it happened so soon too.

The term 'before' was a pretty hazy description of what time felt like. Before, when? Before he got sick, or before he took his daily medication. Time was just an illusion that repeated itself, tricking people into thinking that time, did in fact, matter.

Before - a long time back, they had hired a professional therapist to chat with the patients. I don't know, to talk about the conditions and how they were feeling.

George was fifteen at that time, and he was hopeful about the situation he was in. A part of his consciousness told him that it was going to be only a couple more weeks he had to spend here, that he could go home if he waited a while.

So he appreciated the therapist, or tried to. After all, there was nothing else he could really do about anything. It was mandatory.

Every week, the same doctor in the same uniform visited the prison-like hospital room. She sat in the small red folding chair that rested in the corner, holding a notebook that seemed heavier than she was.