Back of the ambulance. Stark white clean plastic everything not gleaming metal. Two in the morning summoned by futility pointing at the fragility of everyone of everything. Only the joy of aloneness in staring down Death and daring Life on the jagged erratic line with nothing no one sitting alongside promising anything. Anything.

Heart running a marathon stuck in place in space. Mind elsewhere racing nudging foreign ribs awake to the wailing siren's call. Ambiance in elevated looks exchanged between stranger in need and Angels of Mercy chanced on via my erratic heartbeats. It invades my fear base:

He will not hear my silent scrawl amid the tussle of politics and brawl.

Rear windows bisected by horizontal strips of grey-matter and night. Between them on the freeway the familiar game of Space Invaders played out in virtual reality on the back twin screen: Little orange craft lights appearing between even-spaced intervals unless turns in the road involve new directions and they fly past my view unchallenged.

Paralysed. Unable to control - even with thought - the game playing out in front as I stare back. Polarised into observance. A servant to the greater good my penance.

Corner-eyed fear-skewing my face. Frighting that place awash in reflections. Stories awaiting wings burnt. In my ashes their greatest tale. Explosions. Pictures of coffee bean life-raft escapes. Mouth agape gulping deflections tasting dark matter malleable no time no place no face no name no form. Only seeing the unsaid platter heaped with "feels-like never before baby."

I cannot play I can only stare I. Shaking marionette. An ice cube hissing in the pan. My chest bare attached to wires heart-felt misfires recorded and murmured above my hearing and accompanied by silent nodding. Meanwhile battles take place ahead (behind me) and sometimes red flashes splashes colour the scene like blood and Death clashes with Life successfully.

I lose one. Can they not see me bereft?

Some moments on the ride swarm green invaders fighting for supremacy. Soothing their glow. Words the darkness worthwhile for there would be no words no battling soldier sunflowers framing the fight for Life without the backdrop. Yellow-orange not red and blue lights overhead instead.

Me dead in exile.

Be still my heart.

Be still till finally the game now playing within fades in the fog in from the bay. Enter the hospital emergency and see the sentinel green warriors- these bigger far brightly lit flashing a moment in all panes. My mouth agape. Eyes darting. "Am I in SVT again?" I ask because my heartbeat feels ahead of me.

But then the lights recede as do the spacecraft. A hurried hushed handover and then I am breathing. Safe.

Inside the cubicle I spy yellow and black bat-wings suspended from the suspended ceiling above the elevated nurse's station. (Where the docs play busy behind other screens. X-ray scenes.) "She lives but he dies." "MET Call Resus, MET Call." Lies.

I hanker the embrace within the bat across the way. Its promise of suspension drawing me in drawing me in each turn. Safe and secure intentions. Twin faced the hero yet I mourn his passing on from me to other fascinations. Regret compilations. Other fantastical beings in other cubicles needing saving. (Every revolution of the effigy away from me yet also brings it back. Confusedly.)

It's not ironic too much. Maybe I play Space Invaders risking my heart losing lives and in the making tasting morsels (Death as art) so as to generate some general response from a saturated self. Needing to bleed out once in a while. Needing the pause of silent chest and mind aware- my heart no longer there but flying someplace else.

And rising ever rising to the falling papers floating from my eyes. Life and companion Death mere alibis for cowardice feeding regret meanwhile. Tasty concoctions bereft of the assumption they could have baked in other but cremation.

Morbid attracts morbid. I get it.

"It is time. You understand?" Oh the heart specialist alongside my bed is gorgeous. My type. Lean, mean and enough grey to justify his potency. I look like some crazy cat woman. Dressed in the mid of night with whatever bleary-eyed son and hung-over nephew dredge from the pile of unmentionables flooding my floor. Man-robe top of it all.

"Time to face it," he repeats with a smile knocking my breath meanwhile. "Yes," my traitor mouth announces and I feel the slap back of the head from a foreign hand. "Et tu?"

Everyone now agrees. Apparently. It is time to face reality. Take my heart hand it over to them in outstretched hands. "Heal me," the mantra implored in doorways during the rounds as healers pause to examine their experiments- I am to join that chorus.

"Where is your medicine pack?" asks nurse rummaging through my convoluted costume now piled at the foot of the bed. "I don't have one." "Hmmm..." the incredulous reply, "we better do more tests."

"No more tests." She draws blood anyway. I watch some of it dribble on my arm. She dabs. More dribbles and more dabbing till she's done. Upon return an hour later her head shakes at an apparition her eyes see but refuse to see. "Everything came back within range I bet," my gloat voicing the need for me to be made real. Not enough my escape I need being-validation.

"How about a cup of coffee or tea and a sandwich?" she asks as a concession. I don't do concessions. I do vegan shit: "Nothing for vegans in any hospital, you notice?" Her frown answers before her mouth does- something which warms me to her chilliness. And then she smiles. And then I smile. "How about I go home now?"

Nurse disconnects me from my vitals. No more alarms and miss-beat beeps and fluids filling bladder and me carrying portable everything to bathroom and back- peeps into other rooms confirming I should go. Right now. Before their apathy deluges me.

Leave puzzled looks behind. "Send the other results to my doc." Bum a cigarette cop a lecture from the woman with words like "not enabling you" and hop into a cab. No Space Invaders invade this space. Still winter day the bay a placid lake. Heartache to feel a similar serenity.

The cabbie is a dead man. Eager for life after my mishap (via conversation) I say "Uber will have us in flying cars in two years did you hear?" He says "I won't be here." And I misunderstand. Thinking he is quitting to join the blue-rinse set in bowling whites. Nightmare frights. "I only got a year to live," he adds deadpan. "Oh... Oh I am sorry- No I am not! Live your life man don't let a measure of time define you! Live!"

Inner self-fights. My near-escape composing essays paying homage.

I am talking to a dead man I understand. A body going through familiar motions and the numbness of routine and how time feels like it stretches seconds to minutes minutes to hours. Complacency holding hope hostage does not see mid-winter flowers in his windscreen. Notions of escape a wastage.

"Oh!"

He is prolonging death I understand this too. Facing it only in true form when no battle is possible. Going silently into the silent night and day to day meantime. What use a fight.

"Fight man! Taste every breath and every touching thing! Promise me!" Eyes stare back empty of a smile. "You are a good lady, Miss."

I walk away from a man dead in all but motion. No emotion in either of us and I long to turn back ask of him "Why does it feel like you leave no love in your wake? Is this my fate? Are you a ghost from there?"

A cancer hand waves out the window. I wave back. Open the front door.

Something is different. Tilted. Skewed. Something amiss I miss.

"Hey,"