The Correlation

Sam arrived today, replacing Derek, and before Derek there was Peter, and before Peter the bed had spent a long time easing an A-Z list of illnesses to recovery. Some chronic, some temporary, some accidental, others fatal.  Sam had a broken nose, jaw and internal bruising which put him in the temporary bracket. It would have been labelled fatal had he received another blow to his head, he could smile about that, but as he tried the true centre of irreducible pain pushed flat on his heart.

Confined by these four white walls, and an absent of movement there was little Sam could do but wrestle with his thoughts, which mostly concerned girls.  Girls fascinated Sam endlessly and confused him inexorably.  It was the one thing in his life that he just couldn’t figure out.  And if he couldn’t figure this thing out then he couldn’t figure out the entire architecture of the Human Relationship, so would have missed the major part of what it meant to be Human at all. It was that thought which paralysed him more than the pain burning from his jaw to each retina.

He needed to move away from these four white walls before a tick landed in the psychosomatic box. But he knew all that awaited him were patients shuffling around on their sinewy yellow legs, stiff and thin like uncooked spaghetti. It was catch 22 on the ward; you'll recover from smashed bones and a burst diaphragm but you'll be crying at the loss of  your grey matter. It was so easy to picture the correlation on a graph. Length of time in hospital equals degree of insanity. He thought about documenting his hospital admittance in the good name of science, but the more thought placed upon his mental stability, and the pleasant nurses the less convinced he became of the theory. 

‘‘Do you want anything Sam?’’the nurse pointed at a trolly which revealed various liquids and little dishes of runny tapioca pudding . He dare not ask for a blowjob, so opted for some Vitamin C in the form of orange juice.