The Day I Walked Into the Wrong Room
Chapter 1: My Greatest Fear
What scares you? Makes your spine tingle and your balls pull up into your body, for me, mothers, irrational, firm, stern, scowling mothers, singular and in groups. And if they have babies, I cross the street to avoid them, and yet, nursing mothers hold my gaze, not directly, but out of the corner of my eye, when I pretend to swipe on my phone. I envy that baby, despite the mother attached.
Hospitals confuse me, but typically do not cause my heart rate to increase, unlike now. Multicolored lines on the walls, the floors, with numbers in shapes, strange Latin words, and people in white coats, with metal clipboards and white paper cups, who scowl, while beeps echo through the halls, people groan, sneeze, cry, and wander lost.
After visiting hours, I took a turn that placed me in the middle of a dark hallway with discarded wheelchairs, locked doors, and no one. At the end of the hall, above a white and blue door, my salvation appeared in a half-lit exit sign. Better, the hallway triggered a memory. I must have walked through it earlier. It just looked different with no nurses, doctors, patients, or loved ones.
As I strode the hallway, past dark door windows, the sense of forbidding grew. Last night, I watched a movie about a young woman who had to outwit a surgical masked killer. Each step I took caused panic to grow. My footsteps reproduced memories of the movie while a machine droned in the distance. I passed an empty nurses’ station, and the familiarity resolved. They held the final scene of the movie here. Bright red blood covered the desk where the killer stabbed a nameless nurse in the chest. My chest, as it did during the movie, tingled, as if a phantom knife cut out my heart.
The shadows grew, cold and sinister. I picked up my pace. With relief, I pushed through the exit door and entered the grey concrete stairway. Click, the door locked behind me. I rushed up the stairs past locked blue door, after blue locked door. I banged, but no one answered. I ran back down to the white and blue door, but it remained locked. Down another flight of stairs, I arrived at a red door, which opened into a white hallway with plain green doors on each side.
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