H. Parallel lines and a slender fragile bridge. H is for horror, H is for harmony. H is for hurt. H is for hospital. H is for horror. H is for horror. World a silent seamless chaos, mnemonic fragments, shards of faces, of friends, family, pets, idle hours, dreams and desires, silent noise. And all is elsewhere. All gone. H is for hospital. H is for horror. H. Sudden awareness of the space around you, closing in and getting smaller and sometimes shadowed, sometimes curving, a bilious incomprehensible distortion. H. H is for how. You see nothing, no sounds, no stink of surroundings. H is for haze.

You know you’re there. Surrounded. Unfamiliar wirey webs, pathways; strange routes, strange destinations. H is for hope. Slowly something comes. There are lamps glowing, flicking off-on, silent sentinels standing guard. Blue. You lie still and baffled, motionless and wondering what happened. H is not for blue. Where was all that awful noise, and why this silence, except for H again. Do you hear or remember H? And then the walls and machines and the blue distort and slide away coming back into view in different guises, miasma. H is for help.

You know your name, “of course you know your name a voice in your head whispers” but you cannot remember it. You know where you live, how you live, the picture’s vague but you must know. H is for home. You know that you love and that you are loved, but you don’t know how or why or who. H is for hate deep in there somewhere, somewhere far away. H again. H for help. H again. H is for hospital. H.

You need sleep, you need to rest your unreliable eyes, stop them feeding you with the false data and lies flying fast and frightening into your disrupted liquid mind. Your eyes droop away from the blue, your ears full of ringing and muffled humming. Something H hovers in the glittering dark behind your eyelids in the depths of a distant buzzing in your ears, getting louder. H. Is there more, can there be more? Strange shapes and a resolving rhythm of sound is coming through the dark. A shapeless swell. H is for helpless.

He holds her hand watching an empty gaze unseeing, unwavering, bright eyed, vacant, then the eyes flicker closed again. He hears the machines and sees their comforting lights. Outside greys and noisy jackdaws on the flat puddled roof. It’s warm in here so he takes off his coat and sits closer to her, knees tight against the edges of the bed blue jacket across them. He feels latent tension in her hand and then it fades. He knows she’s there though she doesn’t see or feel him. He tries again like they said. Talk to her. Let her know you are there. Keep talking to her. “Helen. Helen are you there?” “Hi.” Soft so soft. Squeeze. Softer still, “Hello honey, hello honey girl”. “Helen my honey love.” “Are you there? Please wake up. Please don’t leave me alone.” H is for her. H is for here.