It wasn’t a pretty scream. It was ugly and raw and it tore out of her throat like an animal escaping a trap. She screamed until her voice gave out, until the rain softened, until a trucker in the next lane slowed down, watching with wide eyes through the fogged glass.
At twenty-two, Justdanica became a nurse. She chose the night shift in the pediatric oncology ward because the darkness felt like home, and because children don’t ask you to pretend. She held the hand of a boy named Leo while he died at 3:14 a.m., his mother crying in the hallway. Afterward, Justdanica sat in the break room and did not cry. She drank cold coffee and thought about how the world keeps spinning even when a small heart stops. She thought about how she had become exactly what her mother taught her to be: a vessel that does not leak. justdanica
She cried for Leo. She cried for her father. She cried for the girl who erased her poems, for the woman who became a nurse because saving others was easier than saving herself. She cried for every night she had lain awake counting ceiling tiles, for every time she had chosen silence over the terrifying risk of being known. It wasn’t a pretty scream
That was three years ago. Today, she is thirty-two. She still works nights, but now she keeps a journal in her locker—a blue one with a cracked spine. She still holds dying children’s hands, but now she lets herself cry in the break room afterward, and the other nurses don’t stare. They bring her tea. At twenty-two, Justdanica became a nurse