Diary Entry Pages Rewritten 1-5
Original: February 15, 2012
Edited: February 19, 2018
I Lee Ji-eun, as a medical student and intern at the largest hospital of the city, had seen my fair share of blood. In fact, it was probable that I had seen more than any other interns at the moment, with all the blood tests and stained scrubs and patients getting wheeled in and out desperately on stretchers. It was safe to say I had gotten used to it; as the days passed, it became no more than a color. Yet I hated the tangy, metallic smell of blood, the way it was iron in my mouth, weaving into the air and forcing its way down my throat.
In the hospital I worked in, everything was white. It was supposed to be a color of peace and health and whatnot, which I found awfully ironic. I began to get bored of the color white. It got stained with the color of blood and death.
He was no different when I first met him: dressed head to toe in white, staring into nothing, reeking of inevitable death. The standard hospital-issued white robe (flimsy, with no use what so ever) only looked whiter against his pale skin. With his dark black hair splayed on his white pillow and lower body swathed in a thick white blanket and index finger caring a too big of mechanism, he seemed almost insubstantial, as if every cell in his body screams—begs to disappear.
But then he turned towards me, and his eyes locked into mine, darker than brown yet filled with a silver that promised life, and glinting with something I couldn’t exactly place my finger on. Even as my mind wiped itself, there is one thought that fixed itself in my mind: he can be covered in the color, but he will never, ever be white.
“Nice to meet you, I’ll be your nurse starting today.”
He cocks his head to one side. “Wish I could say it was nice to meet you, too,” he begins dryly. “But I’d rather not be in this place at all.”
I gave a half-hearted smile, with pursed lips and eyebrows drawn downwards in uncertainty at the joke.
“So you’re my new personal nurse, huh? I find it so weird that this place does this. But I guess it’s an elite hospital, right?”
“I guess,” I said lamely when he looks at me pointedly.
“What happened to my old nurse?”
I hesitated, but he saw the way my eyes looked away, even for a second.
“She quit, huh? I guess she got tired of dealing with a dying person everyday.”
“That’s not true!” My eyes widening at the sharp tone of my voice quickly slapping my hand over my mouth. He looked at me curiously, the beginnings of a smirk dancing across his lips.
“That’s not true,” I repeat, quieter this time. Always a calm tone with the patients. “Her children needed some help, so she stayed home to be with them.”
“Not going to mention the part where I called myself a dying person?”
I scanned him up and down slowly, the daring smile plastered on his face, his sharp, guarded gaze. But my inner sorrowed heart didn't keep back “Aren’t we all dying people?”
He raised his eyebrows slowly, porcelained teeth gnawing on his bottom lip before they part, and a blunt laugh stuttered out from between them, unused and unpracticed. “I’ve never had a nurse say that to me before.”
I don't say anything.
He chuckles again. “I’m Yang Jeongin.”
But of course, I had already known that.
☕☕☕
The next time I saw him, he was reading a book, one that I don't remember much of. His feet were casually thrown up on the table that bars the end of the hospital bed.
