we were born to lose || nick & hazel
bruise, pristine, serene; we were born to lose.
In a white hospital bed, pale as the lifeless bones of a decaying skeleton, with his flesh exposed through the backless dress of his hospital down, Nick listens to nurses discuss his mental health. He can taste the quiet tap of a pen on paper and their tiny smiles of contempt.
Shame comes in waves. It's not like a scalpel or the cold touch of a surgeon's hand. They never tell you that it can eat away at your insides like a virus. (That it eats you alive.) Shame is not a symptom of the mentally ill. Just a side effect. And besides, Nikolai isn't sick -- physically, perhaps, from the bottle of Xanax he took, from the booze he washed it down with, on an empty stomach no less. But he isn't sick in the head.
In his creased hospital dress, Nick is hooked up to a steadily dripping IV that rehydrates him after they've emptied his stomach. They all look at him like he'd done it on purpose, like he's a suicidal shell of a man, but he's not, he's never been suicidal in his life. He doesn't know what he was thinking when he downed the bottle. High already, probably. He doesn't remember much. He knows that this is the second day in the hospital, and they want to keep him for another, under a careful watch.
There's an uncomfortable silence that drags on, and Nick finds himself rewriting his own song lyrics in his head. Not that it's really silent, ever, in a hospital. Machines whir in the background like insect hives, nurses flit (or stomp, depending on the inclination) from bed to bed, and some janitor or orderly inevitably rattles by the room with a bucket of vomit or cart of soiled bedding. Everything here is blue-and-white, a sick and sterile periwinkle that Nick supposes it meant to be cheery.
He takes the IV out of his arm in frustration, leaves his room without permission or supervision. He can't very well just leave, but he's dizzy and feels sick, and he's still feeling faint, still hallucinating. He half walks and half stumbles, barefoot and bare-legged, into the hallway, into the waiting room. Suffers vertigo and sits down in one of the many chairs, right next to a girl with tubes in her nose, and hell, at least he's not her, right?
The nurses don't stop him. Don't steer him back toward his room. Maybe he could just leave after all. But not now; let him catch his breath first, let him gather himself.
"What are you in for?" Prisoner to prisoner. He has no idea what he's walking into.
