So I stopped in the lobby, bought the worst paper cup of coffee I had ever tasted, signed in at the front desk, and followed the signs to recovery.
A small American flag stood beside the visitor badge machine, and the receptionist barely glanced up when she told me to take the elevator to the third floor.
I remember that flag because I was trying to focus on anything except the families waiting around me.
Hospitals make people truthful in a way ordinary life rarely does.
You notice who is sitting by themselves.
You notice who keeps looking toward the door.
You notice who is holding flowers because they do not know what else to carry.
I stepped out on the third floor and followed the blue signs toward internal medicine.
That was when I saw her.
At first, my mind could not make sense of what I was seeing.
A woman was seated near the corner of the hallway, a folded blanket across her lap, an IV stand beside her, and a clipboard half hidden beneath the blanket as if she had tried to cover it.
Her hospital gown was pale blue.
Her shoulders looked small inside it.
Her hair was short.
Too short.
Then she shifted slightly, and the overhead light touched the side of her face.
Emily.
My ex-wife.
The woman I had divorced only two months earlier.
The woman whose suitcase wheels had scraped across the threshold of our apartment at midnight while I stood in the kitchen saying nothing because I had already said far too much.
My name is Michael Harris.
I am thirty-four years old.
Back then, I was an ordinary office worker who believed ordinary exhaustion could justify ordinary cowardice.
I worked too many hours.
I paid bills late, but I paid them.
I knew which grocery store discounted rotisserie chickens after 8 p.m.
I knew exactly how long I could avoid a difficult conversation before it turned into a wall.
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