Mr. Babydoll and the journals of his inner blizzard [peterick]

XXV

The first thing I remembered was the strongest, most nauseating smell I've ever experienced. The smell was so horribly clean that it felt forced. As if it pushed a form of perfection down my throat that I didn't have and that I had never asked for. My eyelids were too heavy for anything, nearly as if massive boulders were tied to my eyelashes.
By the time I had finally managed to open my eyes fully, the room had grown ten times darker. Not like it was actually getting dark, it was more like a fat cloud covered the sun.

I didn't know where I was. I knew that it was a hospital room, but how I got there was beyond me. The thin curtains painted the incoming daylight in a frail shade of blue and all the five other beds beside me were empty.
Maybe I am dead

That must've been it. I had died. We're all just spending our lives, waiting for a hospital visit anyway. But where were all the others?
Or could there ever be anyone else? Has this white purgatory been created just for  me and me only? Maybe. Because I deserved it.
The doorknob turned and the door sprung open in response. A nurse walked inside the room and she was holding my jacket in her arms.

She didn't bother to spare me one gaze of her eyes and instead just started pulling things out of the pockets of my jacket. I obviously wanted to protest because it was my privacy that is being infiltrated here. She had no right to search trough my stuff. However I could only just sit there in awe because she did it with such a sense of precision as if it was the most natural and moral thing to ever do. She probably did it often.

"What is this?" she asked me and I noticed that she had an accent. She was holding up the blue lighter I always kept with me.
"My lighter." I replied. It was very obviously a lighter.
The woman furrowed her eyebrows as if I was speaking nonsense. "What the hell, do you need that for?" she asked. She was genuinely confused and so was I.
"I don't know? I sometimes need them when we have candles at work." I replied. My voice sounded awfully croaky. As if I hadn't spoken a word for years, so my throat had turned to stone.

"You have a lighter with you at all times because you need to light candles?" She raised and eyebrow like she thought I was stupid. She thought I was lying. "And what do you need this for? To hang up Christmas ornaments, or what?" She pulled out a shoelace and let it dangle in front of my face. I had found it on the street years ago. I sometimes pick up things for fun. I told her that and she almost laughed at me. The shoelace wasn't even long enough to be used as a strangulation method, so I didn't know what her issue was.

She shook her head, chuckling and started to put all the things she deemed as dangerous into a plastic bag. I tried to make peace with the fact that I would never see my precious lighter again. Before she left the room, she seemed to remember something, I could read it on her face and she turned back and put something on the nightstand. It was a letter, it was a little frayed like it had been trough hell and back.
"I was supposed to bring you this." she said and it sounded a little nicer than everything she had said before, but maybe I'm just imagining things.

I didn't respond to her and only stared at the letter. I didn't want to read it. I didn't care. It was a lie, I did care. As soon as the nurse was gone, I ripped the envelope apart and started reading. As if I was hungry for written words. It hurt me how instant I recognised the handwriting. It had garnished the little notebooks at work many times. It had written down the orders of the costumers and sometimes it had knitted a little witty comment for me underneath it.

Hey,

Pete, I have to apologise. I have to apologise to the whole world, apparently, however I only feel remorse when I think about you. You have been my best friend back in that ole shithole of a town and maybe you've technically were my only friend. I don't feel sorry for leaving, but I feel sorry for leaving you alone. But it has to be this way. I can not blame you, if you decide to loathe me from now on.