Lilian paced back and forth through the dull halls, the light as stale and fragile as her mood. The yellow sandals she chose this morning for their cheery colors were now depressingly dull.

Nothing seemed normal anymore. This shouldn’t have been possible. Everything had changed so suddenly and there was no time for her to fully wrap her head around what exactly had happened. No matter how many times the doctor tried to explain it to her, using simple words and speaking slowly. The way one would explain to a child a very hard concept of life.

In this case, death.

While she turned around, ready to walk the neverending length of the hall for the hundredth time, she saw the dreadfully familiar face of the doctor approaching her. Stopped dead in her tracks, she stared into his face for just short of an eternity, searching for any sign of news.

Nothing.

He informed her that Jason was still in critical condition, but assured her for the third time that the hospital’s team is working their hardest to bring her boyfriend to a stable state. She tries telling the doctor that Jason wasn’t her boyfriend, but a stranger she’d met just seven minutes minutes ago. But, no words come out, so she nodded to communicate her understanding. Before returning to work, the doctor gestured to the chairs, insisting that she sits down.

“Rest,” He said. “You’ve been through a lot of emotional trauma in a very short period of time, you need to allow yourself to fully absorb what’s happened.”

There were some things about life the twenty-three year old could comprehend, but feeling responsible for the life of someone she had just met felt impossibly out of reach. It had just happened so fast. The smile from across the bakery, the quick exchange of phone numbers, the truck coming from nowhere. The truck that ruined a perfectly fine morning and brought her and Jason here, to this horrible place that reeked of too much death and not enough survival.

If Lilian hadn’t been watching Jason walk out into the street, hoping he’d turn around to wave goodbye, she would have never seen what could have been his very last steps.

It had only been forty minutes since everything began according to the clock on the wall, but Lilian has a sense it was broken. It couldn’t have only been forty minutes, it wasn’t fair for somebody’s life to end in forty minutes and for another’s to change altogether.

Forty-one minutes.

Lilian had questions. Questions about if this was all life was, if it was all one big wait until a truck comes around a corner too fast and takes you away after you decided to get a muffin from your local bakery. If it was all just a test to see how much pain you could withstand until you break down all on your own. Questions that couldn’t be answered. Her mind was racing, and nothing was there to distract her from the hole she was spinning herself into. There was no family, no friends of Jason here to relieve her of any ounce of the guilt she could feel suffocating her. Maybe they were on their way. Maybe they hadn’t been notified yet. Maybe there was nobody to notify.

Forty-six minutes.

It wasn’t until who Lilian assumed to be a loved one of another patient offered a sad look of condolences as he walked past that she realized there were tears rolling down her face. As she went to wipe her eyes, a piece of something off-white fluttered from her hand onto the floor.

She stared at it in confusion for a moment as it lay there. She reached down, gradually remembering that she had still been clutching the napkin Jason used to write his name and number on. When she picked it up, the numbers were slightly smudged due to her sweaty palms sheltering it from the chaotic world.

She pulled out her phone, the phone that would forever be the device used to punch in the numbers 9-1-1. She wasn’t exactly sure why she did this. She knew that if anything had happened to Jason, she would never forget it, never forget him, never forget a single detail of this day. Everything was already stained with the past 49 minutes. She could never return to that bakery, never wear her cheery sandals again, never drive past this hospital without thinking about the man that she never knew.

But she typed in the number, saved it to the name Jason, and closed her phone.

Fifty-nine minutes.

Seconds after sliding her phone into the blood dripped pocket, she saw the doctor once more. Walking towards her, he had on a new face, one that gave answers. Answers she didn’t want.

One hour.

She knew.