Ransom of the Unloved

He woke up with a zipper down his chest and the room felt wrong, the kind of wrong that sinks its teeth in before you can name it. No cousins pacing, no friends cracking jokes too loud for the ICU, no one rehearsing their grief just in case. The monitors insisted he was still here, but my lungs didn’t get the memo, every breath an overdraft against a future I’d already loaned out to other people’s emergencies. My phone lay facedown, a mute witness to years of “I owe you one” that never matured into anything but more requests, more crises, more nights I’d driven on bald tires to rescue people who couldn’t be bothered to show up for this. When the surgeon said, “He made it,” relief didn’t flood me; it detonated, shredding the story I’d been telling myself about what it meant to be good, to be loyal, to be the one who always answered at 2 a.m. The word “help” curdled on my tongue, tasting less like virtue and more like met… Continues…