Room of Tears

One would say that tears will eventually run dry,

but I knew that they never stopped falling.

Perhaps, this realization had been the most wistful I could have ever pondered on after over nearly a decade of knowing:

not one tear ever fell the same way.

On each day, I willingly walked on the fourth level of vinyl floors to practice what I yearned for nearly my entire life.

The floors were as white and pure as the scrubs that protected my body— contrasted by my tied-up dark hair, brown skin, and the burgundy stethoscope hanging around my neck.

Years in the profession made my entire get-up feel almost old, yet everything I faced were always novel; heartbeats were most familiar to my ears, but they drummed always differently—

from the unforeseen anxieties, to a sleeping toddler’s breath, and to the flutters of dreaded palpitations.

[Yet until now, the absence of pulse sounded the loudest to me,

as its emptiness resonated the heavy drops of my heart.]

However, the echoes in my head were cries,

such as the first screams of a woman’s expected agony that pierced the cold air due to labor.

Every person I knew were counting down the last hours of the day, fully awaiting midnight in their polka dot clothes and the feast of food on their tables.

After all, only one midnight on every year turns an entire year into a new one.

On the contrary, I wore my blue scrubs and my dotted sneakers instead of my usual white coat.

“Wear that, please,” my mother said.

She always believed to follow lucky colors and symbols annually, and since she was saddened of me missing New Year’s Eve and media noche this year, the least I could do was wear a color like theirs.

Alana Matulac’s cries shook the delivery room as she gave birth to her baby girl. Her heavy groans somehow reflected the pain she was undergoing, with occasional sharp curses she threw at her husband, Roy.

Although I knew, they weren’t taking it personally.

The minute the infant’s cries filled the air, all you could hear was Alana’s joyful gasps and sobs until she held her newborn in her arms, while Roy exclaimed and cheered excitedly on the side.

“Alison”, she smiled warmly.

The mother was immediately brought to the backmost hospital room on the floor, which we called the Corner.

She rested quietly with her husband sitting next to her, and the damp quietness of the room turned spellbinding when Alana and Roy reunited with baby Alison. One of my fellow nurses brought her in the room while I assisted the couple.

Alison’s little eyes were closed, but she wasn’t asleep. As Alana hummed a mellow tune, Roy softly caressed his daughter’s rosy cheek and whispered a hello.

That moment was the first time Alison smiled,

and tears streamed down the faces of the parents’ eyes.

Their teary-eyed sighs were immediately interrupted by the muffled booming noises from outside the window.

It’s already 2020, I contemplated.

I hadn’t even noticed how it was already a new decade, as all I could muster were the heartfelt laughs of the Matulacs as they first bonded together as a family.

[Perhaps, we all had that destined new year waiting upon us.]

Not more than a month into the year, the Corner was memorably inhabited by a little boy named Toto.

Oh! How could we forget him?

On little Toto’s first arrival it seemed like nothing was wrong, when his left arm was nearly broken enough to need surgery.

How interesting it was when it looked like he should be bawling by now, but all he did was stare at the ceiling while occasionally smiling at his worried grandmother.

Was he even in pain? Toto didn’t flinch at all, but his fracture reminded me of the time my sister injured herself in soccer when she was 11.

Whenever I checked on Toto in the Corner during my shift, he always asked me what I had for breakfast.

“I had coffee and cookies,” I usually answered.

On one time I had a dull day, I wasn’t able to drink water at least. Toto wailed in response and pulled out a ham sandwich with his functional arm from under his pillow.

“Eat! Please eat, Ate Candy,”

he reminded me while handing me his snack.

I repeatedly refused but he never gave in, so I split the bread in half with a smile on my face.

My morning was gray, but my late breakfast with little Toto brightened up my entire day. I always awaited to check on him every time, and I would find him coloring books on his lap while singing “Tomorrow” with erroneous lyrics.

What a wonderful kid he was.

On Toto’s last day in the hospital, it was relieving, yet melancholic, that he was good to go. I’d hum “Tomorrow” at random times and remember him whenever I saw sandwiches displayed on café stores every morning.

However, his last day was the first time I saw him cry.

Toto was bawling; his right arm grabbed the sheets of the Corner’s messy bed as his parents carefully tried to get their son out.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered to one of my co-nurses.

“I don’t know. The moment they told him he was free to go home, he started crying,” he replied.

Without thinking twice, I grabbed the spare chicken sandwich I bought for my breakfast and briskly entered the Corner. Toto’s tantrum seemed to have quite subsided, yet you could see the fear in his eyes and the snotty whimpers he did not try hiding.

“Hello, Toto,” I greeted.

He inhaled heavily and ran to give me a hug, even with his broken arm held by a blue cast.

“Ate Candy,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to go back home. Please let me get better first. I don’t want to go to school.”

“I-”

Nothing came out from my mouth as his small brown eyes stared into mine.

As Toto was distracted, his father carefully carried him on the wheelchair and exclaimed,

“All right! Time to go home, Toto.”

As he was pushed out of the Corner, Toto turned back to me with a despondent look in his teary eyes,

and I didn’t know why he called out to me.

“Do you know why he was injured?”

Toto’s mother stood next to me, who was wearing a cardigan as gray as her hair yet with a youthful face that quite resembled her child’s.

“No,” I frowned.

“His classmates were mean to him because he’s small and thin. They hit him, and when we picked him up for school, his arm was already broken. We found a new school for him. I hope the children there are nicer.”

[What a shame that the world already decided to throw its bricks upon such a wonderful child. May it never scar him completely, as that would be the worst for such a young age.] 

Early March soon came with a new talk of the town: the novel coronavirus.

I had already known quite a wide range of diseases and pathogens ever since I was a mere pupil. However, the name of NCov somehow ran a chill down my spine.

Its novelty was one I wanted to never encounter.

And how my impression did not fail me! The middle of March was a start of a lockdown. My mother even urged me to buy stocks of groceries and supplements as who knew how long the implementation will last?

The queues were terribly long, and you could see the frantic looks and panic between faces. Many already wore blue face masks such as how I did, and heaps filled every cart and basket on the area.

I constantly messaged my sister, Silvana, as she was buying a couple of needs such as alcohol. There was not a lot left in the shop, and I was hoping she could find more.

By the time I reached the cashier, my upper back started to hurt slightly, even though I carried nothing on my back.

How right my impression was.

The sickness now much more known as COVID-19 started to spread wider among people like wildfire.

None of us were entirely sure on how to perfectly handle everything, yet we tried our best until stronger protocols were held up.

More people came flooding inside, already ill, and I constantly came in and out of work, only filled with anxiety.

I nearly bathed myself with alcohol while immediately stripping myself off my clothes at the laundry to wash them before even entering our household.

I even avoided everyone in the way— no longer kissing my mother tenderly, bonding with Silvana and her son, or even patting our dog on the head.

My days went on to be more alone than ever, as I would rather be a hermit rather than endanger the lives of those I loved.

On one instance when I was walking to my room with a meal of burger and fries I bought, my mother called out to me from the staircase.

“Candy, we really miss you.”

The Corner was no longer filled with the life I once knew.

Our last patient was a middle-aged man named Nado who contracted the virus from an unknown source. We knew he called his family through video more than four times a day; and after he did, he would only weep in despair, as he was worried to never see his family ever again.

It was such a tragedy to know he wasn’t wrong.

We nurses started to wear more protective equipment and tighter masks that left me with deep marks on my face. We all told ourselves it was for the better, yet the news we heard daily did not bring hope at all.

We fell within ourselves, too busy to even be sad.

A woman named Shirley was the next occupant of The Corner. An entrepreneur whose hair was dyed maroon, still constantly typing in her laptop, trying to find ways to recover her business from bankruptcy.

The moment she realized it was all gone, she bawled heavily until she hyperventilated. We were afraid it would make her condition worse.

Luckily, she lived through it, yet what she considered her "life’s work" was already dead. We remembered Shirley walking out of the Corner, her eyes already lifeless as if she lost herself in a small room.

Throughout the months, I continued to monitor the Corner and the patients who came across in it.

I had to admit sometimes that I was no longer optimistic, yet Delia, an old lady I was in charge of told me:

“2021 will be better. I just know it,” she spoke.

Despite wearing a mask and glasses, I saw her smile as she made her statement.

I grieved a week after upon realizing that Delia never lived long enough to witness all these come to an end.

The hospital was both swarming and empty at the same time,

and each day would have played on like the last if it were not for the people I met in the Corner. On the last week of November, a teenager name Aisia constantly lamented and wrote on a notebook.

When I checked up on her before my shift ended, she looked up at me and explained,

“I might not live long enough so I might as well write these things down.”

I nodded and she laughed to herself.

“I would cry, but need the clearest respiratory system I could get.”

[I believe that Aisia was quite wise for what she did. Which is why I’m doing the same.]

I could never forget the sound of my family’s cries when I called them that one December evening.

When I started to sense the symptoms, I wanted to rationalize them as something else.

Maybe I was just tired and stressed, which are the possible reasons for my tiredness and feverish feeling. Possibly even influenza or allergies, who knows?

But the moment I walked out of quarantine knowing I was one of the infected, I could not help to wonder how to deal with COVID-19.

The hospital enclosed me in what I already considered most familiar:

the Corner.

I constantly called my mother and sister as support, and I realized I should have made a better effort to speak to my family every day.

Now I could not.

I started thinking about how I was not able to have a family of my own, with how I never had the chance to find someone I loved.

Maybe I was meant to survive this, for me to be able to experience romance soon.

Nado started to fill my thoughts, when he was afraid to never see his loved ones again.

I reminisced Shirley who walked in fearful about her entire life, yet walked out already empty despite having survived. I was not even earning quite fairly at this time, yet I could not risk putting my family in risk.

They needed to eat.

They needed to live.

I needed to live, as I was one who made a lot possible.

As of now, all I knew how to do,

was cry.

I remembered all the tears and cries I witnessed from the four corners of this Corner.

Not one tear indeed ever fell the same way,

but maybe the reason they fell was because they weren’t meant to stay on your face forever.

Delia crossed the corner of my mind.

“2021 will be better. I just know it.”

I grabbed the notepad from my bag, alongside a free pen I received from a fair.

It was New Year’s Eve, and a year ago from today I wished I spent time at home instead.

Perhaps if I did write everything down, I had something to look forward to in the coming months.

I have survived such conquest.

I made it here.

I learned so much.

And I am proof life can be better despite.

[How I wish that Candy was right. She lived long enough to see this year's midnight, and that was all she saw. — Silvana]