hospitals have a unique feeling
i was in the car earlier on the way back home from a hospital when i had a thought; i'd become accustomed to the layout of the building. the place felt more familiar with each round of taking the same route from the parking lot to the ward all within one day and i thought about all the other hospitals i became familiar with. of course, i'd never explore the whole place, i'd just become intimately connected to the path we take to visit someone. Over time i forget the floors or the room numbers but the feeling stays, the feeling that i was so deeply familiar with the footsteps left in the hallway of a building i'd hated to visit, because it rarely meant anything good. i think about the different rooms i'd visited within the same building to see the same person. i think about how each and every visit for each and every individual had the same sort of tension i tried to hide by acting like everything was okay and nothing was out of the ordinary. though it's probably true for every place i frequent, it's especially obvious to me that i leave behind a part of myself in each hospital room during each visit. with each step i take, i leave behind the version of me that once felt so unwelcome in these buildings, because i'd never been there before and i never had a reason to. the first few visits never hit me as serious incidents. these individuals just had little accidents and they had to come here to heal. but eventually i understood that some of these visits might be the last time i'd ever see some people, or the last time i'd share certain interactions with them. with each breath, the part of me that thought i would never be accustomed to hospitals or thought i'd never have a serious reason to visit left me bit by bit. it's strange because it's not the same as leaving behind a school you attended for years of your life, or leaving a house you once lived in. they're all bittersweet but it's strange to feel so connected to a place you only visit for a few weeks to a month at a time and probably never again. the reason you stop visiting can be so wildly different as well, the need to know and understand the workings of such places fades away with time, for better or for worse. i also thought about all the hospitals i never visited but were the places where some of our relatives took their last breaths.
on a more personal note, i've never been in the hospital when a relative has passed, not even my own grandmother because i stayed home to accompany my grandpa. while waiting for the call to drive him over to say our goodbyes one last time, i received the call telling us she was already gone, hours earlier than the doctors had predicted. somehow it hit harder because the timing was so sudden, despite knowing she'd only last a few more hours at most. when i learned about my granduncle passing, i wondered how it would have felt if i had visited with the rest of my family. i don't remember why i wasn't there, i just remember not really understanding what happened or how to feel because i'd only ever met him once a year during chinese new year and at that age, the adults hadn't bothered trying to have proper conversations with me. i don't remember how i found out about my uncle but i remember seeing two of my cousins in the car in the hospital parking lot, i think from one of their instagram stories or in a video recorded for the rest of the family. she had just left the hospital when she got the call that her dad's condition had suddenly worsened. i can't imagine how it must feel hearing the news and i fear the day i have to hear it first hand instead of from other relatives.