Here I am ... lying next to my lover Jean, in intensive care. Slipping in and out of consciousness in shifts. Life slowly dripping out of us . . . Only a 50% chance of surviving our injuries . . . A 25 % chance we will ever speak again . . . We have been in a terrible car crash . . . and were brought to the same hospital where he works as a surgeon.
Jean has been sleeping all of the time that I have been awake . . . As he had been working the night shift. I try to leave messages for him through the nurses . . . But they keep changing faces . . . Too many drips to be changed and bloods to be drawn . . . And while I have been lying here perfectly still . . .
Unable to move . . . Staring at the ceiling counting its squares . . . I have come to realize . . . that I do not even know the person, who I so badly want to survive. As a mistress you fabricate the other person’s life entirely in your imagination. His descriptions have always been substitutes . . . for the absence of shared experiences.
The married man . . . The caring father . . . The life saving doctor . . . He seemed to think it necessary to portray himself as all of these. Now he is muted he can no longer feed me this version of himself . . . And the images I have constructed around his words are slowly disintegrating
We met two years ago in the hospital . . . where I worked as a nurse . . . at the other side of town. I would see him hurrying through the corridors . . . and developed a crush on him. We spent hours chatting in the canteen until I was cautioned. He never really seemed to have to go anywhere . . . He never got beeped away . . .
I had heard of phantom doctors . . . roaming around hospitals . . . Charming but unqualified men dressed in white coats . . . Doing their imaginary rounds through endless corridors . . . Sporting a name badge with a fancy title . . . Giving care behind cubicle curtains . . . Dispensing the treatments they in fact needed themselves . . . I was in love and couldn’t see that he was one of them.
Looking back of course the signs were obvious . . . Although I used to see him coming out of the operating theatre . . . with blood on his shoes . . . He didn’t really seem to know any of the other staff. But before I had enough time to get suspicious . . . he said he got a transfer to here.
This is the hospital he told me so much about . . . although I was never allowed to visit him here. We would meet after work in my flat . . . and he would tell me about different cases. But his stories were getting less convincing . . .
Details didn't’ match up.
When I confronted him with my suspicions . . . That his medical knowledge was stolen from text books . . . He suddenly claimed he was being sued for neglect. One of the operations he was in charge of went wrong . . . and a patient had died under his hands. He seemed devastated and I really wanted to believe him.
Soon after he conveniently changed to the night shift . . . Now we only overlapped for an hour each day . . . He would visit me in the early mornings . . . Cleverly waking me precisely between two REM sequences. When my brain was at its slowest . . . Any questions I had left were silenced by his surgeon’s fingers. .
He would whisper things like he was the man I should continue mankind with. I have tried to make it to his ward to find his name on a door. Stumbling weekly across the hospitals white shiny veins . . . I know I am walking around the backdrop against which his lies were set. Because today all my suspicions have been confirmed . . . For the first time I have managed to stay awake through the visiting hour . . Nervous because just lying here in the same room seems like evidence. I was perplexed to see his side of the family lounge remain empty . . .
No wife and kids have come to watch my lover sleep . . . Nor any cards or flowers from his colleagues . . . It actually seems that none of the staff know him.
He couldn’t be my husband . . . But by being my lover he could hide his empty life.
When I asked him for the last time to leave his wife . . . He panicked because he wasn't married. He drove us into a tree . . .
Hoping to take me with him to a place . . . Where I could receive his love . . . Without him having to be someone he wasn’t.
