i am sitting here on the kitchen floor with twenty-four tiny plastic bottles spread out like some kind of tactical map and i realize i have forgotten if i gave him the amlodipine or if that was yesterday because the days just bleed into each other now and the light from the fridge is the only thing keeping me awake—it is 0214 hours and i am staring at a little pink pill that could literally stop his heart or keep it going and i feel absolutely nothing besides a mild irritation that my knees hurt from the linoleum... is that weird? does everyone feel this? i spent ten years in the service doing logistics and now i am doing logistics for a dying man who used to tell me how to tie my boots and it feels like the same damn job just with higher stakes and less support i remember when i was deployed we had a system for everything and every action had a clear objective but now i am looking at this list of contraindications and my brain is just static... he is sleeping in the next room breathing heavy like a broken bellows and every time he coughs i freeze because what if i gave him two of the blood thinners instead of one? i am supposed to be this high-functioning mid-career professional with a 401k and a project management certification but i am terrified of a plastic tray with the days of the week printed on it... if i miss a dose the doctor said he could have a stroke or a seizure or just slip away while i am making coffee and i wonder if i would even cry or if i would just check it off the list as a mission failure it is the sound of the pills rattling in the bottles that gets to me the most like tiny little bones hitting the plastic over and over—i spend three hours every sunday night sorting them into those little slots and my hands shake even though i have handled live rounds without blinking a goddamn eye... people at work ask me how i am doing and i give them the standard civilian response of oh i am hanging in there but really i am just waiting for the next crisis to drop—i don't know how to talk to people who haven't seen a body or seen someone fade away like a photograph left in the sun for too long so i just stay quiet and count the pills again he woke up an hour ago and looked at me like i was a stranger and asked when his daughter was coming home from base and i just told him i was the nurse... it was easier than explaining that i am right here and i have been here for six months while my career is basically on life support just like he is... i don't feel sad about it which is the part that probably makes me a monster—i just feel tired in a way that sleep won't fix... i keep thinking about the supply chain and how if one link breaks the whole front collapses and right now i am the only link left in this house... what happens when i snap? does everyone just wait for the break? i found a pill under the radiator this morning and i don't know how long it has been there or which one it is because it is just a white circle with some letters i can't read without my glasses... i sat there looking at it for twenty minutes wondering if this was the one that caused the dizzy spell he had on tuesday or if it doesn't matter at all in the grand scheme of things—i feel like i am defusing a bomb every twelve hours and there is no EOD team coming to bail me out... just me and my spreadsheets and a man who forgets my name between breakfast and lunch sometimes i catch myself hoping for the emergency just so the tension would stop and we could get to the end of the movie... that sounds COLD doesn't it? but when you are trained to look for the exit and the quickest way to neutralize a threat you start seeing death as just another objective to be met... i have all his vitals logged in a notebook and i track his oxygen levels like it is a SITREP but none of it makes him more alive—it just makes him more of a data point... is this how it ends for everyone? just a collection of prescriptions and a daughter who forgot how to feel anything but the weight of the next dose? the house smells like stale broth and rubbing alcohol and i can't get the scent out of my clothes no matter how much i wash them—i go into the office and i feel like i am wearing a costume because i am thinking about dosage timings while my boss is talking about quarterly projections... i want to scream at them that none of this matters because eventually they will be sitting on a floor at 2am wondering if they killed their father by accident... but i just nod and take my notes and wait for my phone to buzz with the alarm i set for the next round of meds... tick tock i am going to put the pills back in the cabinet now and try to close my eyes for three hours before the sun comes up and the cycle starts over... i wonder if he knows how much i hate those little plastic bottles—i wonder if he knows i am terrified... probably not... he just sees the person bringing him the water and the little paper cup... i am just the supply sergeant of his slow decline and i wish i could be something else but the training stuck and the empathy burned out a long time ago...