mine {h.s.} | {b3}

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

— CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT —

july, year three.

I don't remember the first time that I entered Seattle Medical Center. Realistically, I'd been a regular from about the time that I was old enough to enter the day care center attached for the children of staff members. Back when my mother was still around but before I could go to school, I suspect that she had me hand in hand walking in the front doors every day. Certain feelings have stuck with me over the years. As a child, this seemed to be my own personal playground. To this day I remember making a game of escaping the day care room. At home, my entertainment wasn't in the form of the colorful toys that were used in the day care. What fascinated me, instead, was the hustle and bustle of the hallways. Though it was no place for a child, I did anything I could to sit out in the hallways and watch the people at work.

Once I was old enough to go to school, I didn't spend nearly as much time at the hospital. Certainly not in the day care. I can imagine once I got to a certain age, they didn't want to have me back. I was a walking threat to the security of the children. More than once, I'd accidentally left the door open in my wake.

Graduated from the day care, my mother would stick me in whatever halls of the hospital that she could. She left me to do homework there before she deemed me old enough to watch myself at the house. As a child, I was good in school. I was quick to do my homework because I knew if I finished it all, that meant I had more time to sneak off and watch the surgeons and nurses at work.

From a young age, I was fascinated.

When my mother deemed me old enough to stay home by myself, I no longer found my way through the hospital halls that inspired such awe in me. Until I returned for the first time in July of 2019 for my intern orientation, I forgot how magical the place was to me. Through med school, I'd been to hospitals in and around Seattle. But, none of them had that quality that this place does. In thirty-two years of my life, I've never been able to articulately verbalize precisely what that quality is. It's a feeling that you get when you walk the halls. The ability to see that the world is changing around you. That lives are being saved and lost and there is a continual movement towards perpetual progress. All that is seen beneath the stark white walls and the clinical smell.

Maybe I just lacked the ability to see that the place has always felt like home.

I'm a creature of habit, I've come to realize. To this day, I live in the house that I grew up in. Renovations have been made, but the general structure is still the same. It's more decorated to mine and my husband's tastes—now, we've even taken efforts to integrate the influences of Ruth and Fitzy as well, seeing as it is their house, too—but it is still the same house that I grew up in. I can see it in the bones of the house.

To this day, I work in the hospital that I grew up in. I married the man that was my best friend, the only person in the world that I couldn't ever really and truly imagine living without.

All these thoughts circle through my mine on a casual day at work at the end of July. I find myself walking through the hospital, looking for Raven Vargas to have her sign off on something for a patient of mine. I'd checked her usual hiding spots, moving through the hospital halls on autopilot in the way that I can do these days. I reckon there isn't another living soul who knows every hallway as well as I do. Not many other people grew up here, using this hospital as their playground. I see this hospital through the eyes of both an employee and a child.

Checking finally with one of the nurses, I found out that Vargas could be found in the auditorium. My feet carried me there easily, on their own accord.