All Chapters of How I Met My Wife.: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I almost didn't come.That's the part I left out of the version of this story I'll probably tell my sister later. The "I woke up, threw on the sweater, and took a Lyft straight to Cedars" version is cleaner. Prettier. Doesn't include the fact that I stood in front of my closet for forty-five minutes trying to figure out how a person with one arm in a sling and visible track marks from an IV looks "casually put together."Spoiler: they don't. They look like a hospital ghost.But I came anyway. Because the follow-up email said Dr. Black, and apparently I'm the kind of person who takes a Lyft across Los Angeles on a Wednesday morning for a man who said nine sentences to her in a single conversation and made her feel like the most interesting patient of his entire shift.I'm not delusional.Cedars-Sinai at 9:45 a.m. is its own little ecosystem.There's the lobby crowd, tourists in flip-flops clutching coffees, looking up at the ceiling like they expected a chandelier made of miracles. The

I don't know how long we both stayed crouched.Long enough for the fluorescent light above us to flicker into a slightly different shade of bureaucratic white. Long enough for my ribs to remind me that crouching was, in fact, a thing I wasn't cleared for. Long enough for the sticky note to sit on the floor between us like a small, polite bomb.He moved first.He picked up the note. Slowly. Like he was giving me exactly enough time to look at it again, or to look at him, or to do neither of both. Then he folded it once and slid it into the front pocket of his white coat. The pocket that said Cedars-Sinai, Department of Surgery. The pocket where a man's wallet and a folded piece of paper and a small cracked piece of his dignity all sat together.He stood. I stood. We were very close. He didn't step back."I'll see you out," he said."Okay."He didn't say sorry. He didn't say forget you saw that. He didn't say anything at all. He just gestured at the door and I walked through it because

There's a specific kind of silence at Cedars-Sinai before the hospital day really starts.Like, around 7:30 a.m., before the residents have started panicking and the surgeons have started doing their rounds. Before the cafeteria line wraps around the corner. Before the fluorescent lights fully commit to being the most depressing color known to man. There's this lull where the building just exists, and you can hear a coffee machine somewhere on the third floor doing its slow, defeated whirr.I know this because I was standing in the lobby at 7:45 a.m. on a Thursday in October, holding a small paper bag I didn't want to be holding, feeling like I had just shown up to a job interview I didn't apply for.PT appointment. Not with Aiden. With a woman named Linda, recommended by everyone, pleasant, official, very into resistance bands. The appointment was for eight. I had arrived twenty minutes early because I am now the kind of person who is pathologically on time to things that might let h

Seven days is not a long time.It is, in fact, an extremely specific amount of time in which a person can:- Transfer their entire physical therapy care to a clinic in a different neighbourhood- Tell only one person (Sophie), the real reason- Have seven entire Sophie phone calls about it- Delete the text thread with -A and then restore it- Restore the thread, screenshot it, save the screenshot in a folder labelled DO NOT OPEN AGAIN, and then open the folder eleven times- Buy a really good candle at the Silverlake Farmers Market to "reset her energy"- Apply SPF 50 every morning, religiously, to a scar that is already faded- Miss him in a way that is genuinely starting to affect her grip strengthSeven days.This is, I think, the maximum amount of time a person can go on pretending they have moved on with their life.The Silverlake Clinic is nice.I want to be very clear that the Silverlake Clinic is a nice place. It is on Sunset, between a coffee shop and a plant store, in one o

The floor of my kitchen is cold.It is, in fact, the most uncomfortable part of the entire apartment. The tile is the kind of tile that was put in by a landlord who was not thinking about women sitting on it in their thirties having emotional experiences with surgeons. The grout is a slightly off-cream. There is a small hairline crack under the rug I have not been brave enough to look at in a long time.I am sitting on it.The umbrella is on my knees. The phone is in my hand. The text is on the screen.Ice your knee. -A.B.I have read it fifty-three times. I am not exaggerating. Fifty-three. I have counted. I am not going to count again because counting is for people who are not having a small crisis in their kitchen on a Tuesday night.A.B.Not -A like the sticky notes. Not "A" like a single letter. A.B. His full initials. Like he has decided to be slightly more of a person and slightly less of a ghost. Like he has decided that whatever he is doing on this phone, at this hour, with t