Shedding

She pulled away the barcode from her wrist. The plastic bracelet took a while to break.  It had been hours, it had been days in fact since she had last noticed it, but it had been there, witnessing her pains, ever since she'd joined that weary cast of warded patients waiting to be well.

After she'd got home, and turned her key in the door, and seen the usual mess just as she'd left it, and charged her dead phone, and boiled her stale kettle, she'd spent an unmeasuredly peaceful afternoon soaking the hospital away from her skin, from her hair, from her soul.  She had found her bed under her books and allowed sleep to wrap her up.  She had felt her heart break with the next morning in the sudden light of her aloneness, but had slept again and again and again until she was able to sing without crying, and make another cup of tea.

And the wristband declaring her patient identity had been there all along, gently applied by that unremembered nurse so that there had been no irritation, no reason to relly notice, not even while she'd bathed so long.  It really was very clean.  No risk of contamination there.  But today was for the taking, and it no longer belonged on her body...

She was glad that her strength, her focus, was back, and it did not resist her for long.  She was glad that she could unpick it efficiently without resorting to scissors. She was so glad that she no longer felt tied to the hospital.

A few days later, after setting the computer to defrag, she was considering dinner and reached up to the packet of dried beans on the top shelf.  Her right wrist was exposed by the fall of her sleeve and she saw.  A shadow of dust had settled with the hypoallergenic adhesive that she hadn't felt clinging there.

Again, she thought.  I'll have to use a little extra soap on that.