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In seven hours, Trinity will have to leave her love on the surgery floor of their hospital. She will hold her hand as she walks down the hall alongside the gurney, where their capable coworkers will accompany her beyond a line that Trinity can’t follow her. And she will have to be okay with that.
Until then, they would be right here in their bed, Baran with her head in Trinity’s lap, in the low glow of the lamplight. Anxiety hums through her body like an electrical current, but maybe the rhythm of Trinity’s breathing can calm it. Maybe tonight she could let herself float in the ocean that is her girlfriend.
Trinity actually did sleep with a sound machine on. It emits soft ocean waves into their small space. Baran had always been one to sleep in silence, but now she couldn’t imagine drifting off to anything but the slight tinny sound of those waves. She discovered she got lonely when Trinity worked the occasional night shift. The queen bed felt too big without the one who wore that crown. She reached for her in her sleep.
“Trinity,” she mumbles.
“I’m right here,” Trinity answers.
“Go to sleep,” Baran tells her.
“No you go to sleep.”
Baran can hear the smile in her voice.
Neither of them expected to get much, if any, sleep at all tonight. Baran had stayed up all night before her first brain surgery as well, laying that time in her mother’s bed watching a Persian soap opera. She was unfathomably anxious– her nervous system melted to mush, limbs quivering– but she was also excited. Her care team gave her the hope that this surgery would mean being seizure free. She could barely even imagine it; she couldn't remember ever being seizure free.
She could meet and marry someone and they could never even know about this whole part of her life; this minor flaw in her master plan. She could be a doctor, any kind of doctor she wanted! She could learn to drive, not be worried about her diet or her caffeine intake or her sleep schedule triggering an episode…
She couldn't even laugh at her former self’s optimism, because even though it sounded too good to be true, it had been true for years. She had gotten to do all those things and more, things she never even dreamed of.
She doesn’t regret keeping this part of herself from Fahrouz. It was what it was. But she is very glad to be this transparent, this vulnerable, with Trinity. She didn’t have to do the work of explaining anything to her– Trinity understood what her health condition entailed, understood what her life as a doctor entailed, understood her body, her mind, her passions. They shared most things in their respective houses even though they didn’t live together yet– Baran wore Trinity’s sweaters, stole her claw clips, used her cereal bowls and her butter, put laundry in without asking or being asked, and swept up the messes she made, and Trinity did the same when she stayed over at her place. Not to mention, Trinity was just genuinely her best friend.
Because she was here with her best friend by her side, she was incrementally less nervous and infinitely stronger staring down the barrel. She thinks back fondly to earlier today, at Trinity’s laugh overpowering the sound of the clippers, as they dove in Baran’s most dreaded part of her surgery prep (even though her surgeon made it clear it was optional. Baran didn’t want to deal with what havoc the blood and the glue and bandages and the bedrest would wreak in her already birdnesty hair, not to mention the new hardware on both sides of her skull.)
“It looks so… stupid,” Baran had exclaimed, looking in the mirror at the hack job haircut Trinity had lovingly, skillessly executed. They had agreed not to buzz it down to a complete zero, but maybe they should have. She needed to fix this. She looked like a chia pet.
“Are you seriously looking at yourself and thinking you don’t look so fucking hot right now?” Trinity asks. “Do you need to get your eyes checked? Be so for real, you pull this off incredibly. You are so gorgeous.”
She pats her girlfriend’s head the way someone pats a stranger’s dog, which does not help with feeling sexy. With a completely straight face, she declares, “You’re my shorn little lamb.”
“Oh my God! A shorn sheep?! I need to call Dennis to come help us fix this. I can’t look like a shorn sheep, Trinity.”
“I meant that you look cute! You’re SO cute!” Trinity protests. “Are you calling Dennis because he knows how to deal with farm animals?”
Trinity chuckles, looking at something on her phone.
“Look,” she says, “My mom is cleaning shit up in her house and found this old picture of me.”
Baran gasps with excitement, looking at the picture of her love as a grade schooler, knee-high socks and pin-straight hair down to the waistband of her shorts. “Oh look at you! Look at how cute!”
“I was very girly for a very long time,” Trinity says, her voice taking on a tone of amusement. “Let's see if Mom sends any of my old gymnastics photos.”
Baran smiles, reaching up to play with the ends of Trinity’s hair, no longer how it is in the old photo at all. “I so deeply wish we could have met earlier in our lives.”
“You wouldn’t have liked me before my frontal lobe developed, trust me.”
“But I wish we got more time to spend together.”
“We have our whole lives,” Trinity reminds her. “If this is about tomorrow, you’re not…”
“No,” Baran says, “Not really. I just get caught up in thinking that there’s never going to be enough time.”
“You’re a sap,” Trinity tells her. She’s smiling, though.
Baran keeps going. “There is a term in Arabic, ya’aburnee.”
“I’ve heard you say it to Kian.” Trinity nods along.
“It means you will bury me.”
“That’s an ominous thing to say to your three year old, but alright…”
Trinity’s wit has, once again, disarmed her. She takes a breath and smiles. “It doesn’t translate well. The full saying is I hope you will bury me before I bury you. As in, I hope to never live without you.”
“Oh, that’s actually really sweet.”
“Ya’aburnee, my Trinity.”
Tears immediately sting Trinity’s eyes, Baran spots them before she can blink them away and deny them. “Oh, shit, that’s, like, really sweet,” she says again. “You really love me or something.”
“Yes, I really love you or something.” Baran grins, imitating Trinity’s tone.
“So, wait a minute, you're saying that you want me to have to be the one to grieve?”
“Well, let’s face it, Trinity, I’m a bit closer to the nursing home than you are.”
“Oh, how eloquent.”
“And as of tomorrow, I’ll have had two more surgeries on my brain than you have. And epilepsy significantly increases dementia risk, and stroke risk…”
Trinity presses a finger to Baran’s lips. “Nope,” she says simply, as if it’s as easy as that. As if her power, the power in a tender, young nope will stop the natural order of the world, which is that people get old and then they die, sometimes of dementia, sometimes of strokes, but always of something.
“Will you still come visit me in the nursing home when I’m old and decrepit and you’re still young and hot?”
Trinity laughs from her gut, like a shaken soda can. “Honey, I would come visit you anywhere, anytime. And if it comes to it, I’ll throw you the best funeral. I’ll even do the traditional Islam mourning period thing if that’s what you want.” She drags her nails gently along Baran’s scalp. “My little lamb.”
“Oh my God, not that again!” Baran exclaims, propping herself up on her elbows. She looks up at Trinity. “Will you play Landslide at my funeral?”
“With those puppy dog eyes you’re giving me, I’m playing the sad animal shelter song. But you’re not dying anytime soon, so this is a conversation we’ll have a million more times.”
“You’ll indulge me every time,” Baran says. She doesn’t ask, she knows the answer already.
Trinity rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling. “Of course.”
Baran props herself up higher, reaching for a kiss. Trinity indulges her here, too, with a warm fervency that she eats up. “I love you, Trinity.”
“I love you, too.”
As Baran settles back into her spot lying in her lap, somewhere in the land between being awake and asleep, Trinity’s fingers still sparkling on her scalp, she hears her whisper into the darkness like a prayer. “Ya’aburnee, my Baran.”
------
But Trinity didn’t pray. She’d sworn off Catholicism around the time it became very clear that God was not coming to save her. But desperate people pray. People in waiting rooms in hospitals pray all the time.
Of all people, it’s Garcia that zips into the waiting room, peeling back her mask with a sigh.
“Trinity,” she says. Trinity knows her too well, she knows what the inflections of her voice say before any words are said at all. “There’s been a complication.”
“What do you mean you don’t know what happened?” Trinity asks, peering into the ICU room where, under a series of tubes and wires, her love lies very, very still. Too still. “Isn’t it literally your job to know what happened?”
“You know that sometimes things just happen in surgery and we don’t know why,” Garcia says. She stands a respectable distance away from Trinity, as she practically emits electricity, bordering on aggressive but truly just masking that she’s scared. “Neurosurgery has its litany of complications.”
“Things can’t just fucking happen to her!” Trinity exclaims. “She has a three year old waiting to be able to hug his mom again, he needs her! And two parents whose kids are their whole world and who haven’t seen her in months! And and and and… and me, she has me. And I had this fucking feeling, I spent all last night awake with this pit in my stomach…”
“What feeling–anxiety mixed with sleep deprivation?” Garcia asks. “This didn’t happen because you weren’t manifesting good vibes or whatever, Trin. Sometimes things just happen.”
“So now what?” Trinity asks, turning back to look into the room she so badly did not want to go in, but couldn’t imagine being anywhere out of sight of. “We wait? We pray? I watch her breathing rate on the monitor and try to breathe with her? I don’t know what to do with a girlfriend who isn’t waking up from anesthesia!”
“Yes, it’s a waiting game. And in the meantime, the ICU staff are going to take very good care of her.”
“It was supposed to be me taking care of her.” Trinity says out loud. In her head, it sounds more like it was supposed to be me who needed to be taken care of.
“Okay, Superman,” Garcia placates her. “Remember to rest and hydrate. This is likely a marathon, not a sprint.”
Trinity presses her palms into her temples as Garcia walks away. This can’t be happening, this has to be a bad dream. She fell asleep after all, Baran’s fuzzy, buzzed head against her thigh. They were laughing; everything was good, everything was fine, as fine as it could be. Baran fell asleep with a smile on her face and that’s all Trinity had wanted. Everything was going good, how did they end up here?
She doesn’t want to go in there. That doesn’t even look like Baran lying in that bed. Even from here, Trinity can see that her skin is waxy and the wrong colour. She’s swollen and it’s making her face look wrong, and Trinity isn’t yet used to her hair being cut short and haphazardly like that. She probably smells wrong; too sterile, too… too much like a body, not a person, not like Baran who smelled like jasmine and rosemary, and sometimes freshly-brewed coffee. Like a patient, not a doctor. Like… a dead woman, and not her girlfriend.
She will have to call Fayrouz first. Baran’s parents did not speak enough English for Trinity to tell them, properly, what has happened. She could probably cobble together surgery, bad, come now, but Fayrouz could explain it better, fluent in Farsi and in English like Baran was and like they were raising Kian.
She can’t even think about Kian right now or she is going to lose it right here in the ICU hallway, and that would be irredeemable to her reputation in this place. Especially if she was going to be fighting tooth and nail for her love in the coming days, until Baran was able to fight for herself again, she could not be seen crying right now.
Garcia comes back just as Trinity finally musters up the moxie to step inside the room. She’s straightforward as always; as straightforward as Trinity would be if she were talking to a patient.
“Baran has a DNR.”
“Shut the fuck up, no she doesn’t.”
“She does, Trinity.”
“Well it has to be outdated, then, there’s no way. There’s no way! There’s no way we’re just going to sit here and watch her decompensate when we could save her!”
“Have you discussed other wishes with her? Has she said she wanted something else?”
No, Trinity realizes. No, they hadn’t discussed any scenario in which today ended like this. They hadn’t wanted to speak it into existence.
No, Trinity realizes, all she said was that I would bury her before she buried me.
“Fuck!”
“Lower your voice,” Garcia asks her, shutting the door to the room.
Trinity scoffs, arms crossed over her chest. “Why, I’m gonna wake her up? In that case, I’ll yell louder.”
“Because someone who is not as understanding as me is going to ask you to leave if you’re not careful.”
“I work here!”
Garcia is quick to put her in her place. Her small, insignificant place. “Not up here you don’t. Up here, you are an ICU patient’s girlfriend. And you are not in control.”
“Well neither are you,” Trinity responds stubbornly.
“No, I’m not,” Garcia acknowledges. “That’s why you better start praying and hope God will listen to an angry little lesbian like you.”
Trinity huffs. She doesn’t like it when Yolanda’s right.
She pulls the chair up to Baran’s bedside. She’d love to lie beside her, but she doesn’t want to risk crushing a tube with her butt or hitting something she shouldn't. She’s a little afraid to even touch her right now, she’s so fragile-looking. Baran isn’t fragile.
This is all wrong.
She ends up lightly kissing Baran’s cheek, her right one. It looks the least wrong.
“I’m not playing Landslide at your funeral unless it’s in fifty years,” she whispers. “Fine, okay, I’ll bury you before you bury me, Baran, but can’t we please wait? Leaving me a widow at 27 isn’t very sexy of you.”
Even in a time like now, she’s deflecting with jokes. She’s gotta cut that out.
“We have so many moments ahead of us. We have things we’ve talked about, places we’ve talked about going. I’ll go anywhere with you, whether it’s across an ocean or just to the grocery store. And I have so many things left to learn about you, there’s so many things I don’t know about you and things you don't know about me. I have so many questions left to ask you.” With her voice lowered, she adds, “Maybe one day I would’ve even asked you to marry me.”
She takes a deep breath, or tries to, anyway. Like she had last night, she whispers like a prayer. “I love you, my Baran. I love you so much, I will bury you before you bury me.”