I finally caught a break from hauling my tired ass around this spaceship. My watch said I had clocked in nearly 5 miles in the last 2 hours. That’s a lot for a Wednesday. My shirt was soaked from clocking in all those miles. I took it off and threw it in the dehumidifier along with my pants. I released all the gizmos fall off my arms and let my body fall onto the mattress.

The window at the foot of my bed gave way to the pitch-black universe sprinkled with billions and billions of stars. I turned all the lights off and let my eyes play connect the dots with the stars. It was one of the few things that let the stress disengage from my body. I wondered if any of the stars were our Sun. My back hadn’t felt the heat from it in decades.

As my eyes darted from one giant burning ball of gas to the next, my mind drifted off to a distant memory back to when I was still living on earth. Back when body was still bathed by the warmth of our Sun. It was my last day working in the hospital. I was taking care of this cirrhotic who just kept bleeding. No matter what I did to fix his coagulopathy or how much blood I gave, he just kept oozing. It’s what happens when your liver is in the dump. I had already called the gastroenterologists to come and scope him, but they were tied up with someone else that was bleeding.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Bleeding is a bitch. Either in your brain, your guts or somewhere else. You bleed enough, you are going to die. Either from losing the blood or the blood putting pressure on something else – like your brain. Some people go slowly like that cirrhotic, others fast like an unlucky bastard shot through some major blood vessel. To save these people giving blood was a core part of treating them. But blood became something more than just something we gave to a bleeding person. It became synonymous with time.