Thursday Mourning

Ever walked into a hospital

at 11:30 on a Thursday morning?

You should try it sometime —

right after brushing your teeth

but before brushing off mortality.

They say hospitals are places of healing.

That’s a lie.

Hospitals are where hope goes to wheeze.

I used to think of them as synonyms for death.

But this time,

death wasn’t the problem.

Love was.

Sometimes,

you drag the house to the hospital

so the hospital doesn’t become home.

That Thursday was one of those days —

clouds in mourning,

light trying to peek in

like a timid apology.

Hospitals are just temples

where gods wear stethoscopes

and no one bows —

they just wait,

quietly,

desperately,

on plastic chairs

that have seen more heartbreak

than generations of poets put together.

In temples, people are restless.

In hospitals, they’re frozen.

Nobody trades time here.

Time is the disease.

And we’re all terminal.

You won’t find complaints here.

No gossips. No gripes.

Just strangers

holding hands with absence.

The sick don’t argue.

Only the comfortable have that luxury.

Here, rage is a memory

and ego is irrelevant.

This isn’t a battlefield.

It’s a casino.

Everyone’s betting on breath.

Everywhere you look —

saline drips, oxygen masks,

the soft hum of beeping machines

pretending they’re still fighting for you.

And the silence?

It isn’t peace.

It’s a scream that ran out of voice.

Hospitals are where poetry dies.

Language becomes clinical.

Manners become redundant.

The body becomes

an attendance register of failing systems.

All gods become one here.

No colour, no caste, no flags,

no rituals.

Just one shared religion

called “Please, not today.”

Old people, children,

young lovers holding onto each other

like the drip might leak prayers

instead of paracetamol.

There’s a scent to these corridors.

Not antiseptic.

Not death either.

Something in between —

like hope rotting in a sealed jar,

forgotten in a fridge

no one opens anymore.

You don't leave a hospital.

You carry it home —

in your prescriptions,

your silences,

your inability to cry at movie deaths anymore.

Because once you've watched a loved one

negotiate with breath —

every god, every poem, and every promise

starts to sound like

an arrogant sales pitch

for a product that never worked.