Jamie never liked hospitals. They were stale. The children’s section was always painted pastel yellow and the wallpaper perpetually peeled; centimeter by centimeter. The staff looked like the walking dead. Jamie didn’t like the polarity of hospitals. The wings seemed to represent the spectrum of life. One wing had humanity seeping from its exit doors, flung wide open in the freedom of being healthy enough to go home. Another wing had no humanity in sight; only the hopelessness of discarded “get well cards” and dying flowers. Someone can go in a hospital and have the best day of their life, or the worst. One man goes in the hospital; comes out with a terminal illness and a time bomb strapped on his back, only to be remedied by chemotherapy that makes death feel somehow tangible. One woman goes into the hospital; comes out holding a bundle of new life and exuberance that cant be amounted in the weight of her newborn baby. That life was predetermined by which wing your hospital bed lay in seemed unfair to Jamie; there was no choice, only a nurse pointing you in the direction of your imminent gain or loss. All the good, all the bad- rubbing up right against each other. It unnerved Jamie. Thats why he was so aloof, so unimaginably quiet when he took his wife Emma  into the hospital one night in January; around 3, maybe 4 in the morning. Emma had woken up in the middle of the night to get water and tripped on their son’s toys. She fell and hit her eye precisely, and quite hard, on their Ikea coffee table. She got a sizable black eye and a scratch above the arch of her eyebrow. So Jamie took her to the hospital he disliked so much. And he held her hand and let the doctor stitch her up, but sat in the waiting room; because, as stated before, he simply didn’t like hospitals. This is the point in the story where I should tell you Jamie is black and Emma is white. I didn’t want to, initially, because this wasn’t initially a story about race. It was a story about people. But someone always make it about race, somehow. So, yes, Jamie is black and his wife is white. That it why a white male doctor approached Jamie in the waiting room and said he should be ashamed of himself for beating his wife, and a white female nurse slipped a domestic-violence-hotline-number in Emma’s purse. Because apparently in the 21st century when a black man walks a bruised white women into a hospital, people immediately assume that black women caused said bruise. But what if it had been a white man? Would anyone think anything of his bruised wife? If they did, would they have the brashness to approach him about it? And so Jamie thought of his skin color, and his wife’s skin color. It seemed life was a hospital, and race were the two wings. The white wing was filled with newborn babies, and permission by the doctors to leave, and hope and happiness. The black wing was the wing of lost dreams and scared teams of doctors who dispense little pills to prevent the inevitable. And there was little Noah, Jamie and Emma’s son. Where did he fall in this spectrum of fair and unfair? Noah with his half mixed skin tone. He was the middle ground. He was the cold, dimly lit hallways between the two wings. He was everyone, he was no one. Would he be granted with the joy of the white wing; the privilege, the acceptance? The wing that receives medication on a silver spoon. Or would be born into the black wing? The wing society always seems to blame- the wing nobody wants to go into, and some people never come out of? And so Jamie thought, and decided he really despised hospitals more than he thought possible. Because why does one wing get everything- the laughter, the surprise of life? And the other wing gets nothing but death. Its so predetermined and unfair and he felt very hopeless. And so Jamie took Emma, with her domestic abuse card in her purse, home to their son- and hoped he could lead a life where happiness could be found in all wings of a hospital. That the two wings would join together in flight for a just society.