If I Were to Lie in Limbo

S taring, staring as the ash burns lower and lower to the knuckles, and then I smell the burning cigarette filter; a concluding, half-conscious drag. I lift the corner of the bed and grind my remains beneath the bedpost. I don’t want to be out in the main lobby this early in the morning. I’m the only patient awake and there’s only one person out there, keeping watch and judging me. I’ve had to use the bathroom in the small hours of the night once, my toes cold against the tile as I rushed across it. I had felt the stare. It pinned me down—a girl, naked on the table—and his scalpel-glare cut into me through the bathroom walls. It had despised me for being a smoker, being awake, being here, for being the reason that he sat through the night at a desk in the dark; I’ve never gone out at night after that. I want other patients to be walking around, the ones who actually become lost in their thoughts, their realities until you can see right through their frames. Those are the ones you don’t have to worry about. They consume the stares of anybody around to take the judgment, but that doesn’t matter to them. Their world is in their heads. Streams of sunlight are just now reaching the tips of my toes, making them glow and warming them as