Emergency Room Romance

... or How We Fall Apart Together

The waiting room at Saint-Mary's Hospital is purgatory with worse magazines. It's 11PM on a Tuesday, and we're all here for different flavors of catastrophe. You're holding your wrist wrong, I'm pressing a torn Wildwood t-shirt to my palm, both of us casualties of loving too hard or not hard enough.

You ask what happened. I say "kitchen accident" but mean "I punched a wall after reading her letter." You say "bike crash" but your eyes say "I wasn't watching where I was going because I was thinking about him."

We share the last magazine, hip to hip, mocking bland stories. You switch between languages mid-sentence; English for facts, French for feelings. I follow your lead, finding comfort in the linguistic dance, the way switching tongues lets us say things sideways.

A nurse calls your name. Before you go, you write your number on my good hand with a pen you borrowed from triage. "Pour comparer les cicatrices," you say. To compare scars.

I never call. You never expected me to. But for three hours in that fluorescent limbo, we held each other's pain like it was precious, like it was ours.