Every day, like this.  Phones ringing and clocks swirling and gurneys and blood, every day, except one day you wake up and there's just no point.  He wants to tell them.  He keeps stopping, breaking his stride in front of girls with coffee, mothers with babies, nurses and needles, wants to say, "Wait, wait, there's got to be more than this."  He doesn't think anyone would believe him.

In the lounge he stares blankly at the tile, green patterns that mean the walls are still standing.  He doesn't have the faith left to try and lean.  He isn't sure when it stopped making sense.  He's sure he was this person before.  Disaster struck, sliced into his life and lung and Lucy but he was, he had to be this unhappy before.  This kind of misery isn't born from incident.  This kind of misery builds, lulls you to sleep with years of thinking you're making a difference and, still, people keep dying.

So it's the quiet coppery taste of failure on his teeth that wakes him, makes him remember when he smiles at whoever's just walked in.  The hallway is yellowed by lights, fake lights he can't stand, and he's broken and achy, his days like months and no one can do fucking anything.  Which should be fine, he should be able to fix everything, right?  Training and all of that mother-fucking bullshit, five years, no, twenty years of a life wasted pursuing a dream that doesn't exist because no one is God.  People give half-smiles and say it over and over again, and he knows even they don't believe it.  You can't smile and say you aren't God when people die before you, next to you every day.  You can't say you aren't God when sometimes it's your fault.

His mother believes in God and he thinks it's always been a lie.  Every word of comfort he's ever offered is a lie, because, you know what, people, it fucking hurts, it doesn't get better with time or distance or, who said it first, space, doesn't soften just because you knead it with memories of happiness.  It isn't lessened when you share.  It isn't softened because you once remembered how to smile.  Loss is always loss, it's always wicked, it always leaves scar on your heart and no one, not the best surgeon in the world, not even God can take it away.

He pushes through a heavy wood door and thinks for a second it's all a joke, it's all a great comedy, somebody jerking them around and laughing that they don't know better.  He's had thirty seconds with his strings cut and all he knows is that this kind of clarity is pain.  He can lose control, now, because he'd rather be lost than found here.  Even rich little boys with stars in their eyes wind up with needles in their arms, because if you can see that it's wrong, it's all wrong, then there are no heroes, there is no God.