POV: Kim
Five hours and eighteen minutes.
I know because I counted.
The room had a bed, a bathroom, a window with an excellent view of a wall, and a guard outside the door whose presence I'd confirmed at the forty-minute mark by saying "hello?" in a conversational tone and receiving absolute silence in return. Which was its own kind of answer.
Five hours and eighteen minutes of locked door and wall views and the gradual, unpleasant process of cycling through every stage of processing a situation you did not choose and cannot exit.
The thing they don't tell you about the stages of grief is that they don't have to go in order.
I had started at acceptance — that pleasant, delusional ten minutes this morning where I'd thought things like my problem is them and now we're getting somewhere
