When Green We Are Insane

She knew something hurt and before then she did not know that she had a child growing inside of her. They were running down some old granite stairs, warn away by time and millions of busy feet. They were a few meters wide and curved slightly to the right, grey with speckles of white.

Earlier that day she had spent an enormous amount of time deciding which clothes to wear. She did not understand why she had bothered to pack a bag when in the end she had taken her whole house with her to go to the wedding of her cousin. She worried only about how other people would view her, and so she did not want to wear a dress and she did not want to brush her hair. Her inner battle with her wardrobe was really a cover up for what else was going on. She had fallen in love, and she hated it. How could she do this. She had spent the last two years of her life telling herself that she could not live without this man and suddenly she was about to give him away for another. It was so much water, pushing at her, all at the same time. She wanted to be happy with the past but right now it wasn’t appearing to be a future. She had never known how to tell the truth and when it came to that moment of telling him, she just told him that she wanted to be alone and for him to leave her. She just wanted to be hugged and told that she was right, that lying was bad. She had to be truthful, to herself at least. He laughed, and left. She picked up a belt and put on a dress.

As she was running something hard hit her foot. She stopped. Miscarriage. She expected a gush of pain to hit her and selfishly some slight sense of relief that she was no longer bound to one life for the rest of her own life but she just didn’t have enough time to think these things. Everything went white and her head hit the granite where a million feet had stood for perhaps a second each.

She had a child, an extremely tiny child. So early. One minute she was not aware of its existence and suddenly it was there, represented by a tiny etching on an A4 piece of paper. The baby was sick.

They were back up and running again, around the streets of a dirty and dark city where everyone seemed to be disappeared or drunk. There were no business people rushing to work but there were no tourists or lovers or friends or delinquents. Just people walking around staring blankly at impossibly pointless details such as cracks in the wall of a hundred year old sky scraper or a crack in the sky before the all too familiar rain came out. This city was apathetic and this city didn’t care that someone was dying. A baby is not yet a life, and to them, a life didn’t even matter.

They found a hospital. It was a dark building, of course, with a tarnished metal sign above the entrance that read Doctors; beware lack of medical degrees but employees do read at a university level. The bricks were bumpy and covered with algae and hurt to touch but at the same time were so smooth and inviting. She was dragged inside before she became a patron of the city.

There were doctors everywhere, dressed in white with red baseball caps on and stripy red socks. They were laughing and dancing and sitting and crying and doing everything imaginable but paying attention to her. She pulled out the etching and screamed at them to fix her baby but they were laughing at her as though she was imagining that they were doctors. It was as though they were actors, drunk, at an after party for a play about incompetent doctors.

They were actors, and she was an actor. She was acting out everything, watching herself, do the stupidest things, say the stupidest things simply to gain attention. One doctor stopped and grabbed her chin, shoved a light in her eye and a tongue depressor in her mouth and asked her What the fuck is it that you are in need of young lady, girl, Madam? She told him that her baby was sick and that it needed to be better so that it could grow old and make all in her life good again. He told her that was no reason to have a baby but she knew it was also no reason not to have a baby, so she ignored him. This in turn caused the apparent doctor to ignore her so she pushed him from behind and shoved the etching in his face and explained to him, while ripping the paper to pieces, that if he doesn’t help her the baby will die.

The doctor stopped, as did all the other doctors in the room. A few turned around and walked away, a few closed their eyes and sat down and a few chose to stare at what was to come. The doctor picked up the pieces of etching and put them in her hand. This, my young lady, girl, Madam, was all you ever had of a child. You perhaps considered that you wanted one a while and so pretended your work was a work of life when in reality is not but just a print, of what you yourself will never have. Consider this a blessing, this reality, this truth and take yourself across the street to the building made of stone. They will have a home, for such a young lady, girl, Madam, as you.

She knew she had killed her child, by getting angry. She had ripped it to pieces and everybody knows that a baby cannot grow old if all parts of its body are separate and torn. The brain needs the heart and the heart needs the stomach and the stomach needs hands and feet and eyes and mouth and hair and knees, to exist.

They walked across the street to a building labelled Psychologists; beware lack of values but employees are required to attend church once a year. They pushed their way through the large red doors that matched the dark and dirty red stone of the building. The inside was not white and clinical but dirty and old. The floors was covered in lime green and cream tiles that would have made the floors of a shopping centre or toilet in the seventies. She was careful not to slip as she walked over years of algae that covered the floor in a way that made it evident of the amount of people that entered this building. The walls were empty but for one which had three children’s paintings that hung lopsided from each other. She considered that this surgery did not have many Obsessive Compulsive patients and laughed to herself at the prospect of her humour.

There was a man at a big wooden desk who observed them from the top of his stool that was too high to comfortably make use of the desk. His nose was much longer than what his face appeared to accept and his eyes were so dark they could not be described as being any colour. His hands were tiny and did not compliment the rest of his gigantic body. She looked at him, urging him to tell her what she was doing there, but he chose to continue his staring. She walked past him to a hallway that had no doors at all, not even at the end. Instead of continuing on or turning back, she pushed her hand against one side of the hallway and felt the cold. She bashed her arm against it, willing herself to be strong enough to hurt herself and screaming silently to the child that did not exist. The child that had died before conception.