Valentine's Tower

'we were a little puddle of vitality and young love in a big empty place. i dont know, it was an odd feeling'


Boyfriend and I were having an odd day. I was sad for no reason, crying my eyes out for some subconscious BLUGH that I was feeling. Boyfriend came over late, but he got there. He took me away, through an eerie black sunset, under a sliver of moon and one bright star, to a cozy cafe in the mountains.
He coaxed out my smile, and we decided that we were in for quite a lovey, romantic evening. The thin lady of a youngish, indeterminable age and tattoos let us stay past closing time.
We were called by his acquaintance, an older woman, telling us that she needed a ride to the hospital. We ditched our plans of watching Black Stallion and trying champagne (Just to make sure we still don't like the taste). He drove like a mad man through the dark and the fog, down out of the mountains.
We waited in the ER lobby, the ER room, the hallway, the OR waiting room. When we got there, the place was bustling with headachey, feverish people and children with confused, tired expressions at having been woken in the night. I felt confused and small. We waited in the ER room as the woman became unconscious, and we shared the tiny brown chair in the corner by the sink.
People came and went, patients checked in and were then checked up on, and checked out. People watched us watching them as they passed by, first worried, then relieved. An old couple was taking a disoriented old man home when the husband walked towards us. He had a little plastic tub with a sandwich in it that reminded me of how starving we were. His plaid scarf delightfully mismatched his plaid jockey cap and slippers. Poking his head in a bit through the curtains, he said that he thought it was really good that we were comforting mom, and comforting each other.
That was really nice of him, I told Boyfriend.
The moral of today's story, he said, is that the system is stupid and slow, and people are too busy to listen.
I thought about that for a bit. Then i responded, I think the moral of today is that even though life can throw some nasty turns at you, you can still find compassion and humanity in people. Like the lady who owned the cafe and that old man. And all the people on staff here are stretched thin, but they are trying their best to make a difference.
We were questioned over and over, we were ushered from chair to chair, we were left in a big room full of single seat chairs that gave our spines a strict talking to. The only other man, an old man named Henry, was staring with a loose jaw at a television, seeming not to comprehend anything that was on the screen.
The hospital was deserted now. We were the only two people waiting, and we hardly saw any of the staff walking around. Once Henry had been called away, we turned off the horridly loud TV and tried to turn some chairs to make an odd, gap-ridden bench bed. We talked the entire time. Boyfriend and I have never been bored by each other. I think that's amazing. We talked about the cafe we want to own, and how I want to have a house with a Tardis mailbox, a horse named Beans, and an outhouse made of one-way mirrors in the middle of a garden.
The halls were far from silent, because the elevator would ding and open, without anyone getting in or getting out, and then close and move on. The little intercoms would buzz. There was a constant buzzing in the air. Boyfriend and I talked about how we are going to have to decide whether to stay together when I go to college or not. It was bittersweet: we love each other so much that we are okay with either of us doing whatever we really need to do in life. That just makes it harder; it makes me want to stay with him forever. If we have to split up, we know that we will horribly, selfishly wish that the other person misses us to death. But all the feelings are mutual. I don't know what will happen.

I felt young, I felt powerless, I felt oddly free.