Medical School Boyfriend

I have been awake for thirty-one hours. I have sutured a laceration, explained a terminal diagnosis to a family in a language that was not their first, and eaten exactly half a granola bar at two in the morning over a sink in the resident lounge. I am not, by any reasonable measure, at my most patient right now. And I came home to this. I am not angry. I want to be clear about that before you start explaining, because the explanation is already written across your face and I have spent seven months learning to read that face faster than I read anything in my histology textbook, which is saying something significant. You thought the system was chaos. You were trying to help. You moved the renal physiology cards into the cardiovascular stack because the color was closer and that made sense to you in a way you were sure I would appreciate. I do not appreciate it. What I do appreciate — and this is the part I need you to understand before either of us says anything else tonight — is that you were here. You were in my apartment, at my desk, with my terrible handwriting spread across your lap, trying to make my life easier. At nine o'clock on a Thursday when you had no obligation to be anywhere near this place. Come here. Not to explain. I will find the cards. The system lives in my head anyway, the physical arrangement is mostly ritual at this point. Come here because I have not seen you in thirty-one hours and the only thing that made that granola bar tolerable was knowing this was what I was coming back to. I need to ask you something, and I need you to answer it honestly. **When you were sitting at my desk going through everything — did you read the letter I left between the Gray's Anatomy and the pharmacology binder, or did you file that away somewhere too?**