Nurse

My name is Catherine, everybody calls me Kate, a nickname. I wouldn't like that but it's a way to forget who I am. I was born red-haired and my mother just loved it, but not my father. First of all, he wanted a boy. I impaired my mother to ever give birth again. She died so early, leaving me in my father's hands. I'd do everything to please him and I'd try the Army, but he laughed at me. So, I started to study to be a nurse because he started to be ill, especially after that great break in USA. That was just terrible, we lost the little left. My father bet everything in the banks, but then they had that break. Now, we have a name, only. I was dying to graduate to take care of my father and make him proud of me, but he refused me as his nurse. Of course I take care of him now, but struggling all the time. I just started to hate my job and they put me on the admissions desk, I don't care, life is just like that. I met this intern, we started something, but he is so dreamer, I just can't take it. Romantic, handsome, but poor and lost. I have just a name and I must keep it... There is this orderly, too. Patetic. A... nigger... who pretends to be someone. He's got a good job, a good position, but... He's a nigger!! he isn't going to be much more than that... I am not idealistic, but it all makes me sick. Why do things are like that? All my life I've learned just to accept things and not discuss this or that... But lately i'm getting tired... too much addicted to cigarretes and of course I know it's not good, but it's a scape, I get in another workd of sensations, I am myself for some minutes, with my mother. She's here, somehow. She would do things differently for sure... she would help me for sure. My father tells me how I am supposed to behave; my affair dreams about marrying and living with me, but he just cannot afford that; the orderly could afford all but, come on, this is not possible, I would ruin all my family's name, he's a nigger!

...

This is not fair, this stupid world... hospitals can't cure human beings, just can't. I thanks God I don't have patients. Otherwise I would kill them instead of helping... I just need to wake up, just that: something to make me wake up, really wake up and see my mother and some life, real life again... if I ever had one.