The nurse dried the mascara that had run down my cheecks. I could feel my face blushing and I looked down on my flower printed dress. Pink and purple and dark green, like a forest. It was just me and her in the room now. Everyone else had left. There had been so many of them in there. I'd learned by now that every time a nurse or a doctor said, "Hold on a minute, I'll have to get my colleague," nothing good is going to happen. I'd been going to the doctor's office every day for over a month to get the wound on my leg cleaned. It was a freak accident. Not something good girls do. Drinking too much tequila and falling asleep with the computer chord next to me in bed. The burn refused to heal, it was like me--ugly and smelly. Something you wouldn't want to touch. Still, men kept touching me and I let them. Sometimes skin is the only way to stop the sadness. I'd been working twenty days straight when it happened. Sometimes fourteen hours, or sixteen. I'd been ignoring the fact that I didn't have a home and sometimes vomited from anxiety. I was longing desperately for a place far away. It didn't really matter where, just somewhere silent. Somewhere where I could rest, close to water or fall asleep in the shade next to the jasmine bushes just like when I was a child. But I was stuck in Stockholm. It was August; the nights were getting darker and the wound turned black. A charcoal surface covered my leg. It was necrosis. A part of my flesh had died. A part of me.

When I came into the emergency room that day the first doctor had to go get another one who had to get a third one. They lay me down on on the operating table. The room was just white robes and flourescent light. The smell of clean instruments and rubber gloves. The nerve endings in your leg are dead they said and they didn't sedate me. But still I could feel the scissors cutting through my skin. Someone held my shoulders, pressed me down. The only one of them that I would remember was her. This nurse. She looked like someone's mother. Her face was soft and open. She placed the palm of her hand on my forehead and began consoling me by telling me that I was such a good girl. I could feel the sweat breaking my chest. I felt tears coming out of nowhere and my teeth pressed together hard. There was no one else there to love me but she saw me. She saw that I was tired from the pain. Tired from walking around bleeding, oozing, sometimes crying. I was tired of getting drunk and having sex with people I detested just because they begged or told me I was beautiful. She could see that I was sick of being alone. She could feel the sadness that my mother gave to me when her body built me and she could see that is a part of me. Like my jawline or the curve of my upper lip. She saw that the leaves were changing outside and I was falling. And now she was gently drying tears and eyeliner of my face. "Thank you for being so nice to me," I said, feeling with my fingertips the thick white bandages under my thin black pantyhose. My leg looked fat.  "That's what I'm here for," she said. "Now you go home and rest."