Some days I just cannot do the nursing home. I swear to God I do not know how the people who work here survive it, every day, every gray and unchanging day. There is no tomorrow or yesterday here, only the unchanging now. The endless now.
Most days they line up the inmates against this long wall, with pictures of jumping cats and sailboats lining it. Offering glimpses as to what it was like to be alive. Seashores and farm fields. Its like facing a wall of ghosts.
I walk by there quickly; trying to not see the vacant, sad eyes, some of them moaning, “help me, I want to go home,” but this home place is this unreachable and twisted memory of a better place and a happier time. This panacea that doesn’t exist because it never existed and each day – home – gets further away and the illusion grows more precious. The illusion grows in the fertile madness this unchanging place cultivates.
The ghosts reach out to me, as I hustle by, with opaque skinned, bony thin, shaking hands. Reaching out to me as if I offer a way home and if I can’t give them home they want to pull me back into this Hell with them.
Most of them would rather be dead than suffer the indignity of this place.
The nurses and aides are so cheerful and strong they sing songs and laugh and talk about sunny days after the rain and puppies and the place smells of piss and sadness.
A place where the only thing you look forward is dying.
God, this fucking place sucks.
