The train leaves Sant Sadurní at 6:41, and for half the year it's still fully dark when it does.
Marina is twenty-two. She's in the third year of a nursing degree at the Bellvitge campus, in L'Hospitalet, and she lives forty-five kilometres away — one train, one bus, and a ten-minute walk at the far end. Second carriage, because it stops nearest the stairs at Sants. Same seat most mornings, not because anyone assigned it, but because that's what happens on a line where the same eleven faces travel every day.
Two hours and forty minutes, door to door, there and back. Across a course year, more than four hundred hours.
She's wanted to be a nurse since she was nine, which sounds like the kind of thing people say in interviews and in her case happens to be true. Her iaia was diabetic. A nurse came to the house on Tuesdays — her name was Roser, she had cold hands and a loud laugh, and she talked to Marina's grandmother like she was a person and not a leg. Marina remembers that more clearly than anything else from being nine.
Nobody in her family had been to university. That isn't a tragic detail, just an arithmetic one: there was no one to ask how any of it worked, so she worked it out.
Three afternoons a week she has a job. Four until eight, in a flat in Sants, with Amparo, who is eighty-seven and needs company more than she needs help. Marina took that job for a reason she's not romantic about: it's four streets from the station, so she can work until eight and still be on a train by twenty past. She heats Amparo's dinner, keeps her steady on the way to the shower, and mostly listens to the same four stories about a wedding in 1961.
It is not, in any technical sense, nursing. But she has learned more there about how people actually feel about being helped than any module has taught her.
Here's the thing that nearly broke it.
For the first two months, she couldn't read on the train. Motion sickness — the real kind, the kind that ends with your forehead against the cold window bargaining with yourself. Four hundred hours a year, the single biggest asset she had, and it was unusable.
So in the November of first year, she started recording herself.
She'd read her notes out loud into her phone the night before, then play them back with headphones in, in the dark, at 6:41 in the morning, watching the Penedès go past without seeing any of it. It felt ridiculous at first, listening to her own voice say loop of Henle for the ninth time.
By second year, four people in her class were asking her to send the files. By third year it's a shared folder, and someone she has never met messaged her in March to say thank you.
She failed Biochemistry that same second year. The first thing she had ever failed in her life. She cried in a corridor for about eleven minutes, and then she went to work at four, because Amparo was expecting her. She retook it in September and passed with a seven.
What she wants, when she finishes, is primary care. Not a hospital. A CAP.
Ideally the one in her own town. The one she was taken to with a broken wrist when she was seven.
That's the joke she doesn't find funny yet: the distance she has spent three years resenting is exactly the place she's trying to get back to. She's thought about it and decided it isn't a contradiction. Hardly anyone from Sant Sadurní stays to look after Sant Sadurní. She'd like to be one of the ones who does.
The bag goes on her shoulder at 6:33, when she leaves the house.
Inside: the notes for the day, headphones, a tupper with whatever was left over on Sunday, the flat shoes she changes into before she rings Amparo's bell, and a phone charger she has lent to seven different people this year and somehow always got back.
The strap has gone soft where it sits. It's the shape of her shoulder now, which is what happens to something you carry four hundred hours a year.
Two more years. She's counting.
She isn't complaining.
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