Lost love on a hospital floor

Ripped away
Montreal, QC
February 2019
This photo originally shared on Instagram

This hospital is enormous, so I walk a lot. Fetching coffee from something more palatable than a wretched vending machine is a 15-minute walk across the street. Want to get work done in the giant atrium with the awesome free WiFi? 10 minutes to the other end of the block-long building. I'm pretty sure the parking lot is in another postal code.

Which leaves a lot of time to ponder the meaning of life - or life snatched away - as I move between here and there in a place where you're never really here or there to begin with.

All that wandering also leaves lots of time to stare at the floor. At the mess left behind by thousands of people too preoccupied to notice. Because people don't deliberately litter here as much as they accidentally drop stuff because they have other, more important things to worry about. Countless cleaning staff manage to stay on top of a never-ending, joyless, thankless task, but even they can't get everything, every time.

On this afternoon, I'm glad they didn't. Because all I saw as I rounded the corner was a single, tiny heart in the middle of an otherwise empty stretch of granite at one end of an overwhelmingly long hallway. Did it make for a keeper photo? No. But that's not what I was aiming for. For some reason, I walked that particular way at this particular moment and saw this particular scrap of long-forgotten paper. And I thought it was worth remembering because hearts, in any form, are always worth remembering if they manage to make us smile. And this one did. Simple, really.

Strangers yet again stared at me with that odd mixture of curiosity and we-think-he's-crazy distant-concern as I got down on a knee and composed the scene you see here.

Not gonna lie: I do it more often than I probably should. Because the things that speak to me aren't always in obvious places. Sometimes they're down on the ground where no one else bothers to look.

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