As we neared the front doors that led out into the fresh air, that I so desperately craved, I made eye contact with a young cop. He had dark skin and piercing green eyes with a bundle of brown locks sitting on top of his head. He offered me a small wave of condolence.

Great! Another person who can’t help but give small grains of sympathy to some stranger who they don’t know at all. It was all "sorry" followed by endless statements that things would get better. It was excruciating and irritating.

So I did the most logical thing I could think of in the moment. I looked at him with utter bewilderment and a bit of a glare. His hand stopped midway and he retreated his hand into scratching the back of his neck. His eyes, previously locked upon mine, drifted towards the ground before he turned around, talking to his bulky co-worker.

I didn't feel bad for making him certainly uncomfortable. I don't even know this stranger what-so-ever, my best friend Sam is in a coma, and I'm being blamed for hitting a car that tipped over on my car. I think I'm allowed to be a bit salty.

"Jeff." I hear a faint something as I retreat my gaze back to the dirty white tile

“Jeff! JEFF!” My head darts upward, locking my eyes on my Aunt’s. She wasn’t a frail woman by any means. She actually was very muscular, since she went to the gym twice a week. She tried to drag me with a few times, but I’m too much of a homebody to do that. For one, going running in some dusty place with others? Not my cup of tea. For two, doing such actions in front of others was a definite no go. I was already insecure about many things, I didn’t need the way I lifted weights, or how I ran on a treadmill, to become another one.

“Jeff, Hunny,” Her voice immediately softens once she realizes I’m listening. Another act of goddamn sympathy. “Would you like to go see Sam here before we leave? She should be waking up soon, it’s been a few weeks now. A week or two more, and she should be feeling much better.”

“What if she doesn’t wake up?” My voice broken, coming out in a feeble whisper.

I knew I shouldn’t have said it. It wasn’t fair for others. They didn’t want me to lose hope. They needed me to sustain it because if I didn’t have hope then they didn’t have hope. I was her friend, they couldn’t care less about her if I didn’t have some prior relation to her before this . . . incident. I was the only one who truly cared about her in all of this. Even her own parents hadn’t even gone out of their way to see her even once. I was the only one keeping her ALIVE. If not physically then spiritually. Everyone was saying that it was gonna be okay, but it didn’t feel like it was gonna be okay. I felt like the entire world was crashing down. No one understood how to hurt I was. They thought their stupid little words would help me, would plunge those thoughts of hopelessness right down the gutter. It didn’t. It just raised my concern more and more.

I knew they were trying to help, but every time a family member, a friend, a stranger, a doctor said that everything was gonna be okay. That we just have to wait it out. That we need to keep that hope inside our hearts because that’s all that we can do right now. It felt like they were subtly telling me that the line was gonna go dead in a few minutes, that she won’t wake up, that I’ll be left alone in a world of cruel people and terrible dispositions who are out to get me every second for one thing or another.

It felt like they were slowly telling me I wouldn’t have Sam forever. And that scared the shit out of me, because without her. Without her there, without her smile, or her teasing phrases, the world would become black and white. No color, no love, no me.

“It’ll all be fine. She’ll . . . wake up.” She says with a beaming smile and bright eyes.

That moment of silence, even one second long, wasn’t very reassuring. Not in the slightest.