Today felt like standing in the corner of a crowded room, watching someone you love become brighter for someone else.

My boyfriend had his best friend over tonight, another firefighter, another person who speaks the same language of smoke and sirens and pediatric CPR calls they’ll probably carry in their nervous systems forever. I told him yes immediately when he asked if his friend could come over. I cleaned up the apartment a little. Lit the right lamps. Tried to make the place feel soft around all the heaviness they drag home from work.

And then I noticed it.

The eye contact.
The absence of the earbud.
The way he leaned into every word like it mattered.

There was no music bleeding into one ear while I repeated myself from across the room. No distracted nodding while he cooked or scrolled or played a game. No halfway listening. He looked at his friend like the conversation deserved his full attention. Like the person speaking was important.

And I got jealous in the quietest, ugliest way.

Not because I think he loves his friend more than me. Not because I felt disrespected. It was smaller and sadder than that. It made me realize how hungry I am for his undivided attention because it’s something I rarely get. Maybe when something becomes constant, familiar, domestic, it stops feeling urgent. Maybe our conversations dissolve into wallpaper because we talk every day. But sometimes what I’m saying is heavy too. Sometimes my chest is full of things that feel sharp around the edges, and I still talk into divided attention, into background noise, into one headphone still playing music.

I think that’s what hurt.

And the irony is, sometimes when he tries to tell me things, I’m busy. I tell him, “Tell me later,” and he gets upset because he wants to say it right then. Maybe that distance has been growing in tiny invisible places for a while now. Maybe this isn’t about one conversation at all.

They spent a lot of time talking about work. Trauma dressed up as storytelling. The kind of conversations healthcare workers and firefighters have where everyone laughs at things that shouldn’t be funny because otherwise they’d probably collapse under the weight of it. One of them talked about a pediatric CPR call recently, and I felt myself shutting down the same way I always do when my boyfriend talks about work. Tonight confirmed something uncomfortable: it’s not him I struggle listening to. It’s the subject itself. I hate hearing people bleed all over the table emotionally and call it coping. Maybe that’s cruel. Maybe it’s self-protection.

Maybe it’s because I work in healthcare too, and I’m already saturated with grief before I even come home.

Or maybe I’m judgmental in ways I don’t like admitting. Sometimes while they talk, there’s this terrible part of my brain analyzing every detail, wondering what could’ve been done differently, what mistakes were made, whether things could’ve changed. Healthcare makes people think they’re gods and failures at the exact same time.

They talked about therapy too.

I sat there listening to two men drowning in occupational trauma casually dismiss therapy like it’s optional maintenance instead of survival equipment. And it irritated me more than I expected. Because if your job is slowly carving pieces out of you, why wouldn’t you seek help? Why keep white-knuckling your way through psychic damage like burnout is some badge of honor? Maybe I sound self-righteous because I’m already in therapy. Maybe some part of me thinks I’m handling healthcare trauma “better” than they are because I actually confront it instead of romanticizing emotional suppression.

But honestly, I don’t think I handle it better.

I think I just handle it differently.

And maybe underneath all of this, underneath the jealousy and irritation and judgment, is something more embarrassing:

I want to feel listened to with the same intensity people reserve for tragedy.