Your Ghost.

I woke up from it, and it made me sick to my stomach to think what I had been dreaming about with the love of my life laying there, next to me. A nightmare. He was drunk, like always, but the pig-faced girl was there. We were in the old house on Vine Street, and I felt so out of place, like always. He was walking around the house it was three o'clock in the morning I had been trying to sleep, they were laughing about something I was not privy to. A secret party where I was the butt of the joke. Just like it always was. And awake from the dream I looked over my shoulder and saw him laying there, sleeping so soundly, my prince, my king. I wish I could stop having those dreams. I wish I could just really get past it. And please don't get me wrong, it is definitely not that I would ever go back there, down that road of dust and bones and of dying. The world is certainly brighter now. It's just I guess that the feeling of failure is so final. There is not a hole in my heart where he used to be, nor have I filled it in a vain effort to replace him. There is hate in that spot. I don't have a problem with it, the hate. I would love the opportunity to knock his teeth down his throat, but I would give anything to make the dreams stop.

Allen 1 676

It smelled like vomit in her room, and greasy fish left out too long. An overwhelming stench that assaulted your nostrils by just opening the door, and to enter the room was to commit fully to not become sick yourself, a continuous, conscious supplication. Small, quick, shallow breaths. To the point of hyperventilation. When she spoke it was the deep guttoral ramblings from a nausea so deep you can only know it if you have ever been very, very drunk, and unable to get home. To comfort.

He had just taught me how to spike a bag when I heard it over the radio. He looked at me half somberly, half like a five year-old on Christmas morning. "You ready?" I picked up the keys and we got out of the back and into the front, me behind the wheel. My lizard brain was in command of the next five minutes and I don't remember them entirely. There were sirens, and me speeding down 511, the engine roaring like a dragon startled out of sleep, people getting out of my way. Air horn. And Dan looking at me, giddiness on his face. "We need some response music!" He turns on the ambulance radio and it's on 100.7 and they are playing Let the Bodies Hit the Floor. He rocks out for a minute and turns it off and says it's too early for that and that I'm still in training, and I am laughing hysterically. Fire trucks, lots of personnel, the lady's car is on its side in someone's lawn and she is sitting on their front steps laceration to the head and it is spurting the way only an arterial bleed does. "Go start your assessment," cool as a cucumber he tells me, making his way to the backboards. And later you can actually feel in your chest the thumping of when the helicopter lands and the flight crew comes into the rig and you're working this lady, and everyone has a part to play in it, there are seven of us back there and we are a well-oiled machine. She is transferred to the bird and when it takes off in the snow like that there is a swirling of ice and cold air and against the bible black of the night out in the country it is like diamond dust and the cold feels so welcome after the heat and the sweat of working so hard in the rig. Dan looks at me and I look at him and we both look into the back of the squad and it is a miasma of test strips, plastic tubes, blood soaked rags and gauze and bandages, opened packages, discarded gloves. It will take us an eon to put everything back in order.

It is my first shift out of orientation. We walk back into the hospital after, and everyone wants to know the story of what happened. Dan grabs me by the shoulders and says only, "this is the champ."