I’m not going to describe the case, that’s not really mine to put on the internet even years later, but I’ll say it was the kind of afternoon at the clinic that everyone in this field eventually has, where you do everything right and it still goes the way you were afraid it would. I drove home that night not wanting to talk to anyone, not wanting Priya’s usual after-shift debrief, not wanting Marcus’s texts about whether we were still on for Thursday. I just wanted to sit somewhere quiet.

I couldn’t focus on a book that night, which almost never happens to me, I tried picking up whatever I was in the middle of and the words just sat there on the page not going anywhere. What I ended up doing, a little by accident, was pulling out Star Realms and playing both sides of a two player game against myself at my kitchen table at eleven at night, which sounds like a strange thing to do alone and probably is. There’s something about a fifteen minute deckbuilder with a tight, small, contained decision space that gave my brain somewhere specific and finite to go that a book with an open emotional register couldn’t that particular night.

I’ve thought about this more than once since, why a quick card game did something a novel couldn’t in that specific moment, and I think it’s that a book asks you to feel something, and that night I’d already felt everything I had capacity for. The game just asked me to make a series of small, solvable decisions with a clear winner and loser, and there was something quietly steadying about a problem that small after a day that big. I’m not saying it’s a coping strategy I’d recommend to everyone. I’m saying it worked for me that one night, and it’s stayed in the rotation of things I reach for since.

I texted Priya the next morning, not the night before, just a short message saying yesterday was a bad one, and she wrote back that she’d figured as much from how I left, and left it at that, no follow up questions, which is exactly what I needed from her at that point. We’ve both had shifts like that one, it’s part of the job, and there’s an understanding between people who do this work that sometimes the useful thing is somebody not asking you to describe it out loud again. Marcus doesn’t work in the field and asks more directly when something’s off, which isn’t wrong of him, it’s just a different kind of friend to have, and I’ve learned to give him a shorter version when that’s all I’ve got that day.

Thursday came and I wasn’t sure I’d be up for game night at all, but I went anyway, mostly on the theory that sitting at the table with the two of them doing something normal was better than sitting at home doing nothing. Nobody brought it up directly. Priya picked something light for us to play, nothing that needed real strategic focus, and I noticed after the fact that she’d done it on purpose, reading the room without saying so. That’s the actual value of the group for me some weeks, not the game itself, just three people at a table treating the evening as ordinary when I needed it to be.

I keep the box for Star Realms on a lower shelf now, easier to reach without thinking about it, which probably says more than I mean it to about how often I’ve gone back to it since that night for the same reason. It’s not a solution to anything, a fifteen minute deckbuilder doesn’t fix a bad day at the clinic. It just gives the part of my brain that’s still running on adrenaline somewhere small and finite to put itself for a while.