CORRIDORS OF ETERNITY

You go through a set of automatic doors and are faced with corridors stretching endlessly off in all directions. You pick one and follow it, trudging hopelessly towards the next junction and the next, each time to be greeted as you turn a corner by another endless corridor that looks much the same in its drab, easy to clean, glossy, utilitarian and wholly institutional décor, and which seems to stretch on to yet another horizon, or a junction of yet more similar corridors, all of which split off into an endless maze that you suspect may very well join up deep underground with all of the other similar institutions, despite their insistence that each of them is different in some way, into some kind of vast hidden network of despair and misery.

Occasionally you pass confused looking people travelling back the way you came, also seeking exits that you suspect no longer really exist, and the wardens of the damned dashing along with a job to do or a serious incident to respond to, or other, more (or perhaps less) authoritarian figures pushing along the damned, or the detritus of having just fed the damned, or the hopeless damned themselves, shuffling along the endless corridors of eternity in their dressing gowns, looking for the little shop, the exit, or somewhere to light up the next cigarette, despite the fact that the habit might be what got them inside this depressing labyrinth in the first place.

We all shuffle along miserably through the parts of this strange living circuit board, each of us playing our part in this not-so-merry danse macabre, some of us knowing we’ll be free in less than an hour, others knowing that this might very well turn out to be the proverbial “it” for them, the last place they ever see, and still more for whom this is merely an extended “blip” on their way back to health, happiness, “normality” and, above all, freedom.

Another corridor, and another, and another… They really are starting to all look the same now. So much so that you begin to wonder whether you might meet yourself coming back the other way as time and eternity fold back on themselves, like being trapped inside some kind of etching by M.C. Escher, and  the various wards, A1…, B3…, E2…, all disappear like so many Brigadoons, only to reappear again in a different time and space, as you turn at yet another junction.

So, here we find ourselves on the very brink of April and, off and on (but, in fairness mostly on) all I seem to have done since the middle of January is trudge along corridors that look like this on my way to and from various hospital wards, making reluctant but necessary visits to retrieve washing, deliver treats, and chat about the nothing in particular that is getting done in my life beyond the maze.

The months just seemed to have been chewed up and spat out as a fortnight in one drab labyrinth leads to three weeks in another and another fortnight back in the first, and those all too familiar roads, the sight of which I am becoming heartily sick, followed by the endless trudge to car park pay stations, through automatic doors, and back into the maze, and grabbing one or other of those hard plastic chairs from wherever the particular ward I’m now visiting chooses to hide them, to talk about nothing before bidding my farewells and heading back off into the night again, now convinced more than ever that this routine will never end.

Although – and this is perhaps where fate plays its cruellest card – there is a rumour that I may yet be free of it, that the day has come for yet another release into the great outdoors and that this endless trek through the maze will be over as freedom beckons and the great return home is imminent…

I know better, of course. There’s always the boomerang effect, and perhaps even just a week of respite is more than I can hope for, and all I can do then is sit at home or at work just knowing that the hated telephone will ring and summon me back into the labyrinth again to continue this merry dance.

Perhaps forever…?

Or at least until its my own turn to be trapped inside its malevolent web.