The vending machine down the hall is the loudest thing in the room, which tells you everything. A man dropped his coins twice trying to get the crinkle of a granola bar, and nobody looked up, because looking up costs something in here and everyone is rationing.
I count faces without meaning to. Old habit. A woman folding and unfolding a parking ticket. A kid asleep across two chairs with his father's coat over him, the father holding the empty sleeve like it's a hand. The TV is on mute. Somebody keeps clicking a pen.
Up there, the part of the sky that keeps us all breathing is thinner than the shell of an egg. That is not a feeling, it is a measurement. Two hundred miles up you cannot see a single hospital, a single border, a single person waiting for a nurse to come through those double doors and say a name.
But I saw the whole thing once, the entire warm crust of it, every waiting room lit up at once and none of them visible. And now I can't sit in one and pretend it's ordinary. This is where the fragile part gathers to wait. All these people came here because someone they love is running low on the small margin any of us gets, and they showed up anyway, into the fluorescent light and the bad coffee, to be nearby while it's decided.
The double doors open. Everyone straightens. It isn't their name.
They ease back down, and they stay. That's the thing I can't stop seeing.
Given the odds, given the dark, they stay.