Flowers at Five in the Morning

Thirty hours is a long time to keep your hands steady.

By the end of my shift, the fluorescent lights of the surgical ward had burned a permanent flicker into the back of my eyes, and I had stopped being able to taste the burnt coffee from the break room machine. I was a resident running on the kind of fumes that make you forget your own phone number. But when the attending told me the last case had been pushed to the day team and I could go, something lit up in me that no amount of sleep deprivation could smother.

It was our anniversary. Five years.

I drove to the little Italian bakery on Carrowmore Street that opens at four-thirty for the delivery trucks, and I sweet-talked the baker into selling me a tiramisu before it had even gone into the case. I bought tulips too, white ones, because Elena always said roses were what men gave when they hadn't been paying attention. I set the dessert on the passenger seat like it was a patient I was transporting, gentle over every speed bump, and I rehearsed the look on her face the whole way home.

I wanted to surprise her. I wanted, for once, to be the husband who showed up early instead of the one who texted from the on-call room that he'd miss dinner again.

The house was dark and quiet, which made sense at five in the morning. I left my shoes by the door so I wouldn't wake her. I carried the flowers up the stairs in the dark, my heart doing something giddy and exhausted at once, and I pushed open the bedroom door already half-smiling.

There was a man in my bed. A stranger. Someone I had never seen in my life, his jacket thrown over the chair where I hang mine.

I don't remember deciding to leave. I remember the tulips still in my hand. I remember not saying a word, because every word I owned had simply evacuated my body. I walked back down the stairs, put my shoes back on like a man performing a ritual he no longer understood, and I set the tiramisu down on the kitchen counter as carefully as I'd carried it. I have no idea why. Some animal part of me refused to drop it.

Then I drove back to the hospital.

I parked in my usual spot in the staff lot, the engine ticking as it cooled, and I sat there as the sky went from black to the bruised grey of early morning. A colleague found me there a little after five-thirty, still in my car, the flowers wilting on the dashboard, crying in a way I hadn't done since I was a child. She didn't ask. She just got in the passenger seat and sat with me until the sun came up.

I spent thirty hours that day keeping other people alive. I came home to find I'd lost the one life I thought was mine.