I woke up at five-fifteen in a bed that was not mine.
This was not, in itself, alarming. I had been on enough overnight shifts, had crashed in enough on-call rooms, had spent enough chaotic stretches of the past two weeks in enough buildings that were not my own apartment to have lost my exclusive attachment to my specific mattress.
What was different was the quality of the waking.
Usually I woke up cataloguing — ward, schedule, what needed doing. Clinical brain first, person brain second. It had been my system for four years.
This morning I woke up thinking about a kiss.
About a man on a couch one room away who had told me he loved me with the specific steadiness of someone who had decided the truth was more important than the reception, and then accepted *not yet* with an okay that
