I am the ER.

A black hole carved from steel and screams,

throat raw with blood and bile,

a god regretting the moment

it learned to open.

Bodies fall into me,

clutching the scraps of themselves,

pride flaking like ash beneath my lights,

secrets pressed to ribs, trembling and obscene.

Pain strips them clean.

Sharp. Slow. Relentless.

The animal inside convulsing bare,

their terror primal, heavy in the air.

I take it all.

Every gasp, every confession, every heartbeat,

the wet slap of blood on tile,

the music of monitors pleading and dying.

A father cradles his child,

warmth slipping like water through fingers,

whispers scrape the walls,

bargains no god will answer.

A mother folds in herself,

her scream stretching beyond lungs,

a private apocalypse unfolding,

a sound too vast for human hearts.

Old men cough up decades,

their regret fermenting on breath,

names they cannot bear spill into me,

each fracture a star collapsing silently.

Death moves quietly here,

patient, inevitable, precise,

while life claws back, furious and obscene,

and I remember everything.

Time thickens, coagulates,

minutes fold under their own weight,

hands move like ritual, they compress, intubate, pray,

and the clinical becomes sacred, desperate, obscene.

Some crawl out, hollow-eyed,

bearing the residue of my hunger,

my scent fused to their marrow and dreams,

my gravity impossible to escape from.

Most remain,

folded into bags that lie,

with stillness heavier than flesh,

their absence echoing in my bones.

I keep them all.

The child cooling between frantic hands,

the mother torn by grief,

the old man devoured by sins unspoken.

Each becomes my marrow.

Each becomes my shadow.

Each becomes a memory

that will never leave me.

Outside, the world pretends.

Coffee. Errands. Laughter. Illusion.

Clinging to permanence like children

to suns already dying.

Inside me, time rots and thickens,

every second swollen with grief,

blood cooling, sweat souring,

air heavy with what is lost.

I remember every small, obscene proof

that life fought, failed, survived, vanished,

the terror, the shame, the love

humans dare to carry in my gravity.

I am the ER.

I devour.

I remember.

I regret.

I cannot stop.

I am

the black hole that weeps,

and nothing, not even time,

escapes what I hold.

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More soon.

Another moment.

Another reminder that we are still, somehow, human in all of this.

Yours,

Adarsh Nath,

Letters from the ER