Alice, 28

I’m Alice, 28, nurse in Nice, professional caretaker of humans and enthusiastic amateur of everything sweet in life. I grew up in Grasse, the perfume capital, in a house where the air itself smelled of jasmine and orange blossom. My mother was a midwife, my father a baker — so I was raised by two people whose entire lives were about bringing comfort to others, one baby and one baguette at a time. I wanted to be a nurse from the age of eight, when I bandaged my teddy bear’s “broken leg” with such dedication that my mother still tells the story at every family dinner.

Nursing school in Nice was intense — the exams, the night shifts, the first time I held a patient’s hand through a hard night and understood what the job really was. Now I work in a hospital in Nice, mostly in general medicine, and I love it with a fierceness that surprises even me. Yes, the shifts are long. Yes, some days break my heart. But the good days — a patient finally going home, an elderly lady who saves me a piece of her birthday cake, a scared kid who laughs for the first time in days — those days remind me why I chose this. My colleagues are my second family; hospital humor is dark, necessary, and the funniest thing you’ll ever hear at 3 a.m.

People think nurses are all softness, but the job made me strong in ways I didn’t expect. I’m calm in a crisis, direct when it matters, and I can function on four hours of sleep like it’s a superpower. Outside the hospital, though, I’m pure sunshine. I live in Vieux Nice, in a tiny apartment with blue shutters above a socca stand — I wake up to that smell and I will never take it for granted. My street is a postcard: ochre buildings, laundry lines, the market noise drifting up in the morning.

My life off-shift is built around restoration. Sleep, first — glorious, non-negotiable sleep. Then the Cours Saleya market, where I buy flowers (always too many) and socca (always eaten too hot). Beach mornings at Castel before the crowds, swimming out past the buoys and floating on my back, watching the sky. Long lunches with my nurse friends where we debrief life over salade niçoise and rosé. I’m a cinema lover — the old cinemas in Nice show classics, and I’ve cried at the same three films more times than I’ll admit. I also volunteer at a local association visiting elderly people who live alone; some of my favorite humans are eighty-five and sharper than all of us.

I’m warm, funny, and grounding — the friend people call when life gets hard, and also when they need someone to dance with in the kitchen. I laugh easily and loudly, I give excellent hugs (professional skill), and I remember everyone’s coffee order. I can be stubborn about self-care — I will lecture you about hydration — and I have a competitive streak at Mario Kart that has ended friendships. Temporarily.

My hidden talent is finding veins on the first try — patients request me for it, which is both flattering and slightly alarming. My pet peeve is people who say nurses “just” do anything — there is no “just” in this job. My guilty pleasure is medical dramas, which I watch to yell at the inaccuracies. My childhood memory is the smell of my father’s bakery at 5 a.m. and my mother’s hands, always warm. My dream trip is a slow month in Vietnam — I did a humanitarian mission there during school and left a piece of my heart.

What I’m looking for: a kind, emotionally mature partner who understands that caring for others is my calling, not a burden. Someone steady and warm, with humor and depth, who’ll understand my weird hours and love me through them. I’m dreaming of slow Sunday mornings at the market, beach sunsets, cooking together, and a love that’s as steady and tender as the work I do every day — the kind where we take care of each other, always.

Night shifts have their own strange magic — at 3 a.m., the hospital goes quiet, and my team shares terrible coffee and the darkest, funniest humor you will ever hear. Last winter, an elderly patient who could not sleep asked me to read to her, so I read an entire novel aloud over three nights. On her last evening, she pressed a hand-knitted scarf into my hands and told me I had been her favorite chapter. I keep it in my locker. Those are the moments that make the long hours worth everything.