morning when the hall empties and you can hear the building breathe.
That was when I wrote.
One night, a nurse stopped at the edge of the light.
She was around fifty, with reading glasses pushed into gray hair and a name tag that said Angela.
She looked at the legal pad on my knees and the cardiology newsletter I was pretending to care about.
She didn’t ask questions.
She only said, “You should eat something. There’s pudding in the family fridge that nobody fights over. The vanilla.”
That was
