Easier Than Staying

"There's a particular kind of helplessness in being conscious enough to know that every decision about you is being made by someone else."

The wail cut through first.

Before I knew I was conscious again, before I understood that I'd surfaced from wherever I'd been, that sound was there—high and rhythmic and insistent, the kind of noise that meant emergency, that meant someone was hurt, that meant help was coming or had already arrived too late.

Someone was hurt.

The thought circled without landing. Someone was hurt and there were sirens and I could hear them getting closer, or maybe they weren't getting closer, maybe they were already here, maybe that loudness meant—

Hands again. But not Denise's hands. These were different—efficient, impersonal, touching me in ways that felt practised rather than panicked. Fingers on my wrist. Something cold pressed against my chest. A voice above me, calm and professional, saying words that seemed meant for someone else.

"Can you hear me? Can you tell me your name?"

My name.

I had a name. I knew I had a name. It was there somewhere, filed away in the part of my brain that stored facts about myself, but I couldn't reach it. The path between knowing and speaking had washed out, had become impassable, had filled with debris I couldn't clear.

"Claire. Her name's Claire."

Denise's voice. Further away now, hovering at the edge of things. She knew my name. She was telling them my name because I couldn't tell them myself.

"Claire, can you open your eyes for me?"

I tried.

Something happened—a flutter, a shift in the quality of light against my eyelids—but I couldn't tell if my eyes had opened or if I'd only imagined them opening, if I was seeing or remembering seeing or dreaming of sight.

Shapes above me. Faces that bent and straightened, that spoke to each other in a language I almost understood. The fluorescent buzz was gone, replaced by something else—a different quality of light, greyer, colder. Was I outside? Had they moved me outside?

"Pupils responsive but sluggish. Possible overdose. We need to get a line in."

The words floated past like debris on a river. Pupils. Overdose. Line. Each one carrying meaning I couldn't quite grasp, information about a body that might have been mine but felt like it belonged to someone else, someone I was watching from a great distance.

Something sharp in my arm.

I would have flinched if flinching were something my body still did. Instead I just felt it—the pierce, the slide, the cold that followed as something entered my bloodstream. They were putting things inside me. They were doing things to my body without asking, without waiting for permission, because I was beyond permission now, beyond the kind of personhood that got consulted about what happened to it.

The door only opens from the outside.

The thought came from nowhere and everywhere, from the before time, from the room with the fluorescent lights and the bed I couldn't leave. They'd done things to me then too. Had put needles in my arms and tablets on my tongue and called it treatment, called it help, called it for your own good while I lay there unable to protest, unable to refuse, unable to do anything but receive what they decided I needed.

Movement.

The world was moving, or I was moving through the world—I couldn't tell which. Something solid beneath me, a surface that wasn't the floor, that rolled and bumped in a way that suggested wheels. They were taking me somewhere. Lifting me, carrying me, transporting me to a place I couldn't see and hadn't agreed to go.

The siren again.

Louder now, or maybe just clearer, the fog lifting enough for sound to reach me properly. That urgent wail that meant someone was hurt. I was hurt. I was the someone—the emergency, the reason for the noise, the body that required transport.

"Stay with us, Claire. You're doing great."

A voice I didn't recognise, professionally warm, the kind of voice they trained people to use when talking to the damaged and dying. I wanted to laugh. I wasn't doing great. I wasn't doing anything at all—I was just lying here, just existing, just occupying space while other people made decisions about where that space would be located.

Doors.

I heard them—the heavy mechanical sound of doors opening, of a vehicle receiving a body. Then I was inside something. The light changed again, became contained, artificial. The siren was muffled now but still present, still marking time, still announcing to the world that an emergency was in progress.

A mask on my face.

Plastic pressing against my nose, my mouth, the elastic digging into the back of my head. Air flowing in—forced, insistent, tasting of nothing. They were making me breathe. Even that had been taken from me, even the basic act of pulling oxygen into my lungs. Someone else was doing it now. Someone else was keeping me alive because I couldn't be trusted to keep myself alive.

She's not well. You can see that. Anyone can see that.

Dawn's voice again, bleeding through from eight years ago, from the conversation I'd heard through walls that were meant to be soundproof, from the moment I'd understood that my own mother had signed me away.

Faces above me in the artificial light.

A man and a woman, both in uniforms, both wearing expressions that mixed concern with something more clinical—assessment, calculation, the look of people whose job was to keep bodies functioning regardless of what those bodies wanted. The woman was doing something with tubes. The man was speaking into a radio, words I couldn't follow, codes that meant things I'd never been taught to understand.

"BP's dropping. We need to move."

The vehicle lurched.

I felt it in my stomach, in the liquid parts of me that shifted with the acceleration. We were driving now. Driving somewhere. Taking me away from the studio, from the house, from the floor where I'd fallen and the glass that had glittered and Charlie who had barked and barked until she understood that barking wasn't enough.

Where were they taking me?

The question formed clearly, the first fully coherent thought I'd managed since—since when? Since falling? Since before falling? I couldn't remember what coherent had felt like, couldn't remember being a person who formed questions and expected answers.

Hospital.

The word arrived with a weight that pressed against my chest, that made the mask feel tighter, that sent something cold sliding through my veins alongside whatever they'd already put there. Hospital. They were taking me to a hospital. To a place with fluorescent lights and doors that locked and decisions made by people who knew better, who always knew better, who would look at me and see what Dawn had seen, what Paul had seen, what everyone eventually saw.

She's not well.

Anyone can see that.

The siren wailed.

The vehicle moved.

Above me, the woman was adjusting something, checking something, her face tight with concentration. She caught me looking—or caught my eyes pointing in her direction, which wasn't the same as looking, wasn't the same as seeing—and her expression shifted, softened into something that was probably meant to be reassuring.

"Almost there, Claire. You're going to be okay."

I didn't believe her.

Didn't believe anyone who said things would be okay, who promised outcomes they couldn't control, who offered comfort as if comfort were something that could be given rather than something that had to be earned. I'd heard those words before. Had heard them from Paul, from Dawn, from doctors whose faces I'd forgotten but whose voices still echoed in the hollow places I'd never managed to fill.

The lights in the ambulance were too bright.

Everything was too bright and too loud and too much, the world pressing in from all sides, refusing to give me space, refusing to let me slip back into the darkness that had been holding me so gently just moments ago.

I wanted to go back.

Wanted to sink down into that warm nothing, that place where I didn't have to feel or think or be looked at by strangers in uniforms who were keeping score of my vital signs. But they wouldn't let me. They kept touching me, kept speaking to me, kept forcing air into my lungs and fluids into my veins and consciousness into a brain that wanted nothing more than to shut down.

The vehicle slowed.

I felt it—the deceleration, the turn, the change in motion that meant we were arriving somewhere. The siren cut off mid-wail, leaving a silence that felt louder than the noise had been. Doors opened. Voices multiplied, overlapping, saying things about me and my body and what would need to be done to it.

Then we were moving again—the stretcher rolling, the ceiling changing above me from the inside of the ambulance to something else, to a corridor, to a place with different lights but the same buzzing, the same artificial brightness, the same indifference.

I'd been here before.

Not this exact place, but this exact feeling. The helplessness. The hands. The faces that looked down with concern that wasn't quite personal, that belonged to the role rather than the person, that would look exactly the same at the next body and the one after that.

The door only opens from the outside.

Someone was squeezing my hand. I couldn't see who. Couldn't turn my head to look. Could only feel the pressure—firm, insistent, the grip of someone trying to communicate something I couldn't receive.

"Claire, you're at the hospital now. We're going to take care of you."

The words washed over me without sticking.

Hospital. Care. Take. Each one a small stone dropped into deep water, sinking out of sight before I could examine it. I was at the hospital. They were going to take care of me. That was supposed to mean something. Was supposed to feel like something other than surrender, other than defeat, other than the final confirmation that I was exactly what everyone had always suspected me of being.

The lights above me blurred.

Fluorescent tubes stretching into long smears of white, bleeding into each other, becoming a single unbroken brightness that pressed down against my eyes. I tried to close them but I wasn't sure if they were open, wasn't sure of anything anymore except the movement and the hands and the certainty that I had no control over what happened next.

Mack.

His name surfaced suddenly, unexpectedly—my son, my boy, the child I'd failed to think about for hours, for days, while I spiralled and shattered and ended up here. Where was Mack? Where was Rose? Did they know? Would someone tell them their mother was— was—

I couldn't finish the thought.

Couldn't find the word for what I was, for what had happened, for what it would look like to them when they learned. Would Dawn tell them? Would Paul? Would anyone think to make it gentle, to frame it in words a child could survive hearing?

The ceiling stopped moving.

I'd arrived somewhere—a room, a space, a place where they would do whatever came next. More faces appeared above me, more hands reached for me, more voices spoke in that calm professional register that meant something serious was happening to someone who couldn't participate in their own emergency.

"We need bloods, tox screen, and let's get her on a monitor—"

The words scattered like startled birds.

I watched them go, watched them disappear into the bright nothing that surrounded me, and I felt myself begin to slip again. The darkness was there, waiting at the edges, patient as it had always been patient. It would take me back if I let it. Would hold me in that warm quiet place where none of this was happening, where I didn't have to be a body on a table in a hospital being discussed by strangers.

"Claire? Claire, stay with us—"

But I was already going.

Already sinking.

Already letting go of the thin bright thread that connected me to the room and the voices and the faces that bent over me with their professional concern.

The last thing I heard was a beeping—steady, rhythmic, mechanical. A machine somewhere keeping count of something. My heart, maybe. My life, reduced to a series of electronic pulses that someone else would monitor, that someone else would respond to if they changed.

I let the darkness take me.

It was easier than staying.