In the hospital, I found a man with silver hair.
I was walking between the beds, right next to a small window that looked out on a grey town. The flowers in my hand felt cool and dead, wilted even though their pale yellow petals shone in the dim light of the dark afternoon. I was visiting my brother, who’d broken his arm yesterday. He hated flowers, I knew, but mom had insisted.
The smell of disinfectant and impersonal cleanness hung heavy in the air. I stumbled on a pair of shoes that didn’t belong there right in the middle of the three-bed room. And looked up from the floor, the flowers scattered around me on the fake tiles.
In room number 303, I found a man with silver hair.
He was lying on the bed right next to me and when I looked at him, my breath caught for he looked like an angel. His chiselled features could have been sculpted by an artist, his hair was long and silky and spread out on the pillow around his head like a halo of silvery moonlight. I don’t know how long I stared at him, counting his even breaths by the rises and falls of his chest under the blanket until my heartbeat must have matched his.

I came back the next day. My brother would be released in the afternoon and I brought him a change of clothes. I brought another bouquet of flowers, too, and placed in on the silver stranger’s bedside table. He was asleep again, today.
When my brother didn’t look, I stared at the man long and hard and wondered what kind of sickness he had. He looked okay to me. A bit pale, but healthy.

I came back the next day, and the next and the next. My brother wasn’t there any longer, but I felt compelled to visit the strange silver man again. He never even opened his eyes and day by day, I wondered what colour they were. Blue like the summer sky? Green like a deep pond in the middle of a forest? Or maybe, silver like the moonlight and pale as his hair?
When the young woman that lay in the bed next to him was watching TV or phoning, or simply not looking my way, I carefully touched his hair with my fingertips. It was soft as I’d imagined, the strands like silken water in my palms. I shivered.

I came back every day. I didn’t know why he was there in that room, why the young woman left and two older men were brought to the room, one with a broken ankle, the other with a new hip, and he never woke up. Maybe, they’d forgotten him?
Why didn’t anyone ever visit the silver man? Didn’t he have any family? I wondered and wondered. I imagined him a fae prince from another realm, who’d fallen from the sky and hurt his wings so that he couldn’t go back home anymore. I held his hand for hours on end, quickly dropping it back onto the bed when someone entered the room.

One day, I asked a nurse what had happened to him and she explained he had been in a car accident. She said he should have awakened because there was nothing wrong with him. But he didn’t.
I sat at his bed for a long time that day. I kissed his hand goodbye and left.
When I came home, I went to my room and locked the door. In the darkness of my room, I sat down in the middle of a circle of moonlight that I formed with curtains in front of my window.
That night, I prayed to whatever deity would listen that I could go back in time and make it all right. I prayed that I could go back and make it so the accident didn’t happen. That the beautiful silver man didn’t end up sleeping forever in a white hospital bed with no one coming to visit him. That he had a voice and an eye colour and a smile. That he brushed his hair out of his eyes with an impatient flick of his wrist and sighed.

I woke up to sunlight streaming into my room and knew something was different. I got up and changed into jeans and a t-shirt. It was Friday. It was thirteen days until I’d first find the silver man in the hospital.
My heart was racing when I reached the intersection where it had happened. Would happen. My breath locked in my lungs when I saw him. He was wearing a black business suit, his silver hair was loosely tied at the nape of his neck and his gait was confident. He never saw it coming. I dashed over and stopped in the middle of the road. The realisation that I couldn’t simply run him over and tell him he’d be hurt if I hadn’t because he’d have walked right into a car accident crashed over me.
Instead, I forced myself to walk slowly.
I dropped my backpack right in front of his feet. He stumbled and cursed as he reached for me for balance. His big hand clamped over my shoulder for a second and I met his silver eyed gaze with all thought fading from my mind.
“I’m sorry”, he said, his voice like a silky caress over my skin.
And even as the world started to spin, I knew I was lost in more ways than one.

I woke up to my mother knocking on the door to my room frantically. She was breathless when she told me my brother had fallen from a ladder and broken his arm. It was already noon and I felt tired and heavy, my thoughts in a knot.
I got up with the feeling that something was different. What, I couldn’t say. Just yesterday, it had been sunny and now, dark, grey clouds hovered over the sky when I reached the hospital. I asked my brother’s room number on the counter and they told me it was 303.
The smell of disinfectant and an impersonal cleanness hung heavily in the air.
I looked down at the bouquet of yellow flowers I clutched in my right hand and smiled. My brother didn’t like flowers, I knew, but mom had insisted.
I was walking between the beds, right next to a window that looked out on a grey, rainy afternoon sky, when I stumbled over my own feet. Looking down, I wondered if I’d slipped on the fake tiles and frowned. The flowers had scattered all over the floor and I bent to retrieve them.

Looking up, I noticed the empty bed right next to me and something in my heart ripped apart, slicing like a dagger through my body.
I toppled over and landed on the floor, the flowers crushed beneath my hands. Clutching my hands to my chest, I wondered what was wrong with me and noticed the silver drops on the floor were my tears.
“Sis? Are you okay”, I heard my brother ask from afar and footsteps closed in.
“Yes”, I whispered as my lungs constricted and my mind blanked until there was only the searing pain in my chest.
He helped me stand up and I leaned against the empty bed to steady myself.
“I’m okay”, I said, even though my hand was shaking.
“I’m okay.”
Only that I knew I wasn’t.

That I wouldn’t ever be now.