Departure

I watch you board the bus just two parking spots away from the ringing silence of my own car. I see the driver help you with your bags and usher you into the back seat and close your door. Now there are two windows between us. I see the darkened silhouette of your figure and imagination takes rein of the ambiguity. I remember us waking up this morning holding each other, and the many mornings before. I remember us cradling our cat, pretending it was our child. We are still too young to start a family. But it also means all the family we need for now is each other. I remember when you grew angry at me for forgetting to wish you happy birthday. I remember the guilt I felt. I remember you speaking parentese with me to warm my cold and calculated heart after a chess match. I remember you reading me poetry to slay my insomnia. I still taste your lips. You have no more form behind the windows than the memories which forge their own civilization in my heart. And like a shadow struggling to keep up with its owner, like tears that blur, you were whisked away, and all I could make out was the outline of your hand arranged in a half heart as the driver cut and stormed down the highway and as you disappeared from shadow to memory to nothing to nothing to nothing in my rear view mirror. Wiping my tears I found my hand arranged in the other half too, too late.

Crazy

I think I am going crazy. There are said to be hundred billion neurons in the brain and above a trillion connections between those neurons. I feel them all. I feel them all. I feel every impulse, every ejection and opening of my synapses. I feel the vulnerabilities in the cleft as the currencies of my mind make the voyage between two islands. I feel every depolarization and hyperpolarization, incessant shocks that enable my insomnia. When I open my eyes, a hundred colonies of ants trod my occipital lobe. When I think deeply about a problem, little wisps of pink flame burn my frontal region. Music massages my right hemisphere and echoes in my temporal lobe infinitely. I feel my memories being consolidated in my hippocampus like an artist painting the same stroke repeatedly with a single degree of variation. I feel my hypothalamus frothing more than my mouth when I am hungry. Every breath and every pulse vibrates my medulla. The crippling fear of this hyper awareness manifests in only a grating grimace of my pons. The motion of my hands as the come to console me are indicted too by the testimony of too many voices shouting in my spinal cord. Even my solitude sags to the weight of industrial vehicles whose skid marks burn my ACC, raze my amygdala, brand my PFC. And when I experience trauma I feel that hurt portion of the brain grow brittle, like a child told they are unwanted, the after effects of impact and pain inexorable ocean waves that erode that resilience of my shore. I want it to end. But even the prospection of death douses each neurite with a million rain drops. Even hope unbearably heavy, glial cells erecting walls, consciousness colliding with itself, uncountable mountains that shift to tectonic rumination, to subconscious forces in the depths below the cerebrospinal sea. I am going crazy. I know I am. Because I can feel it forming, forming in my mind.

The Gorge

Is there such a thing as too much awe? Has too much observation and appreciation and feeling on nature caused some sort of hormonal flux akin to depression? Flashes of the river and pebbles and the sky come to me and to my tears. A creative high that is unsustainable and tranquilizes the heart and mind? It is still life affirming but it is as if every one of my pores sieves a different shade of pain and this circulates with every beat of my heart, as if I can hear the cries from every corner of the world, the unrealized dreams of people reincarnated as trees, the rage of the ocean as it laps the shore, the trauma of a mountain eroded into a gorge and the autobiographies of stars we will only hear long after they die or, if we hear, for which we must die. It is too much. I am too weary to strip, to weary to look up, to get up when I sink to my knees. All I can do with half-closed eyes is write. What pain to be a writer. A fighter and athlete risk themselves to physical injury and so are commensurately paid. An artist to prayer and observation and reliving and rendering of emotional pain, without the pay. This is the price of beauty. I grow so intensely, so quickly that every time you see me, you have to get to know me again.

For those who wait

A medical school story

I write this for not only self-serving catharsis but in hope it becomes a seed of resilience and relief for those also in the limbo of anticipation. When confronted with the powerlessness of waiting, of anxiety, dread, heartbreak, I thought why not make these normally maladaptive states of being into founts of gratitude? True, suffering is rife but so is happiness. And so what a privilege to be able to embrace the entire gamut of human possibility, to have the opportunity to experience this unique milieu of emotional turmoil, to consecrate these months into the greater narrative of our lives, to have something to hope for at all. Of course, acceptance is the most desirable outcome because of the prospect of being pioneers and vanguards of the advancement of the human condition through medicine, not just a goal for most of us but a moral urgency, a calling. But even in the throes of waiting, and, God forbid, rejection, tear-stricken and resigned to the monstrosity of re-application, of summoning the wherewithal to continue the pursuit of these dreams so that the contract we have forged with our future selves will not have been in vain… Even if we lay martyrs of the modern medical application system, let us not be stoic nor aggrieved and definitely not vanquished. Let us thank the musings of fate to have endowed us this chance to suffer, to have burned in this universe itself growing too cold, to have felt. Let us recognize that just as the bad days make the good worth having, so too the good days make the bad. Rebel. Like the victim of bullying, sapping joy from her oppressors by laughing along with them. Like the man who kisses the ones who wronged him before he kisses the ones he loves. Like the woman who becomes the lightning in the rain. Our redemption will always be our anguish through the alleviation thereof in others, be they the people we love or the patients we will one day care for. Here is a note of prayer that we may all reach acceptance and achieve our dreams. Here is an extension of thankfulness for finding home in ambiguity, for befriending our sorrows just as we befriend our joys. Here is to worry, to dread, to mourn, to hope. Here is to feel.

Nothing

Life is made for the few. Their destiny unfolding like they are heroes written in a book. The rest of us will be nothing, so useless that we are erased not even by eternity but only the days. We are unconsoled by all of us dying all the same, because our fate is the greatest and worse, most commonplace, oblivion. How the thought of my insignificance, even among man, the only place where I even had the chance, compared to the cosmos and compared to time, chips away at my resilience like a solitary leak in a cave far below a waterfall where the water and sunlight hardly fall, unassuming until at once the entire stone-face falls. How merciless. How absurd. What mockery. What comedy. A mountain kneeling to a drop. It does not matter that a trillion drips summate to the sea; to me it has taken only one. Like a shadow, so immaterial even a blade of sun burns, so despicable that even under inspiration I cannot write. And I have not been spared even the dignity to have become. Just as some have always been the pets of god, like limestone, I have always been, I always was, the thing brought into this earth to dissolve. A memory returns to me on this corrosive morning, dying slowly to the machinations of my own sleepless mind, of a teacher who once told me “Cool it” because my words for the school paper and peer feedback were too intense. I thought then my greatest curse was that I could never write for another eye. But now I know I do not have the consolation of having been passionate because what good is a star in some cavity of the universe that never gave birth to life, so far that nothing ever received its sick message, its lecherous light. I have never been growing, developing, or working towards something. I have always been, since birth, in a constant state of amnesia, of undoing. And any warmth I gave off over the years were the biological and bacterial processes of decay. I have not grown to become nothing. All striving has been self-realization. I have always been and always will be nothing, at best an increasing nothing, like a number erased in the countable infinity of the set of all atoms, then by an uncountable infinity between 0 and .001, like a black hole fated to swallow itself, like a single sperm in one single shot of unrealized cum. What difference is there between me and the dead and the unborn? Nothing. Even at the infinitesimal scales of all life, we are nothing. Nothing.