Background scenes from the ER

Nursing notebooks

I was charting breath sounds on an outdated computer, wishing I could tell myself there was somewhere else to be. I used to sustain myself by dreaming into the next thing.

We were ordering chicken from Crispy Spice and everyone was talking about the Eagles. J was saying, We need to be playing defense and making strong passes. I said, You mean like basic sportsball stuff?

There were hours of nothing doing, the night shift travel nurses falling asleep at their posts, mouths open, they would drive across the state in the morning after a night shift to see their babies and men at home. They had stamina I did not have then and don't want to have now.

The psych rooms would fill up with Saltine wrappers and empty styrofoam cups. A. colored in coloring books. He liked the purple crayon best. I gave R. report on A. before she sat in a 1:1 with him. He’s got uncontrolled diabetes and on Halloween when he arrived I asked him if he was seeing anything I wasn’t seeing and he said, Yea, skeletons, and I said, T’is the season.

I sustained myself by focusing on the present: Guys, the secret is there’s literally nowhere else to be, I said. Maybe I hypnotized myself so I could stay in my hometown as a nurse. Maybe I was writing it all along, the way I’ve written my life from the start. 

That night with the woman who threw herself on the floor, crying to god. I have it written down. There is too much material in the notebooks.

I am here. I am writing. I am trying to think of something to write to start the novel. I want there to be an interiority to the novel as if we are inside the narrator’s head. 

Writing a novel is drilling into time, down into the presence of a past moment, to recreate its contours and its walls. 

Then to stay there long enough in that new house of time, and say something real, and lasting.