The sun rises beyond the glass panes of the window. It pours into the room, flooding everything with light. In its restless, dancing rays, the slowly falling droplets shimmer like crystal tears. Tears that vanish relentlessly into an endless void. The room holds its breath. Everything is so white, so still, so... suffocating. The drops seem to disappear into some deep well, tumbling down through hidden channels, until at last they mingle with a riverbed the color of red wine. The infusion flows into the patient's vein—a body struggling for health, for life itself. Even as you step into the room, a heaviness settles over you, and the sharp, antiseptic reek of the hospital fills your lungs.
Such profound silence is shattered by the labored, sleeping breath of those surrendered, unaware of what trials still await them. The sun that proclaims life to all growing things seems muted here, filtered through hospital windows into something else entirely. Lips cracked and dry. People face to face with death, clinging desperately to life. The wreckage of their bodies—skin pulled tight over bone, raw patches from the long vigil of waiting. Flesh peeling away, the body's slow protest against its own decay. Such indignity. The very sick grow prone to despair and fragility. Their helplessness, their total dependence on the nurses' hands—it terrifies me.
The terror and yearning in their eyes seeps into me like poison, burning from within. They search for something to hold onto. Their will to live, their hunger for it, brings me to my knees. I don't condemn them. They have every right to hope, to believe in recovery. It's not their failure. The nurses are here to care for them. But I'm only seventeen. I've never known real loss, real struggle. Yet their suffering consumes me, fills me with despair and anger in equal measure. The pull to help them wars against my longing to look away, to escape the weight of human pain. I turn their suffering over and over in my mind. Each day, it breaks something in me.
I've never witnessed a man die before. Not until today, in this hospital. I don't know how to bear it. You stand beside a white bed—suddenly so narrow—that will likely be empty within hours. A patient with deathly pale eyes stares past you, unseeing. The sister's uniform means nothing to him. He drifts toward sleep in death's arms, his grip on your hand convulsive, desperate. That's when you become aware of your own heartbeat. A skeletal hand clamps down on yours, a rhythm of terrible peaks and valleys. In that moment, your own shadow unsettles you, and the patient's labored breath—barely there, almost inaudible—cuts through you like a blade. Cold sweat beads on your forehead, trails down your spine, and your lips move of their own accord, forming a prayer. A man is dying here, his gaze already turned inward, one foot already crossing into another world. Then you feel his grip loosen. And then... silence. No more restless fingers clutching the blanket, no more gasping, no more struggling. No more pleas for release. It's finished.
Discoloration spreads across the body. The lips grow slack. His eyes remain open, fixed on the ceiling—empty, extinct—and the twisted grimace on his face speaks of terrible suffering. I cannot maintain professional distance. Cannot be indifferent. I keep my hand in his for a long time afterward, and it will take me far longer than this to shake the sensation: the buzzing in my head, the blood hammering in my temples, my mouth parched and bitter. Before I call for the nurse to report the death, I have to grip the bed rail and force myself to breathe. It doesn't help.
While the sisters tend to the body, I stand apart in the shadows, and if shock weren't holding me together, I would weep. My stomach heaves. The room begins to darken at the edges of my vision. I need to leave. It breaks something in me to watch them handle what remains—that empty shell—as though it were merely flesh, merely matter. I wonder whose father he was. Whose brother. Whose husband or uncle. The firm hand that settles on my shoulder can only belong to Yaqub, my classmate, my friend. I'm grateful for it. Grateful for his presence. In this moment, it's exactly what I need. A single gesture, wordless and complete. I understand perfectly what he is telling me.
AND THE HOSPITAL RUN WON'T STOP. We keep moving patients through as though no one has died. I've always wanted to help people, but I can't. The hospital is killing me. I can't bear the minds or bodies of the sick. It's made me ill and hollow at once. We do so much for people, but it doesn't kindle anything warm in me—no sense of purpose, no self-worth. Quite the opposite. It terrifies me when someone is suffering and there's nothing—nothing—I can do. People have misread me more than once and hurled their anger in my face. God! I'm only 17. I want to laugh with friends. I want to be reckless and stupid. I don't want to stare into this harsh world. And some part of me still believes there's time—time to slip back into childhood, time to wake from the dream of a world without cruelty.
The world is collapsing onto the hospital bed. It moves at the speed of light, and though I reach out my hands, I cannot catch it. I know this. It terrifies me. None of us—the healthy ones—can fathom what it means to live each day crushed under the weight of illness, strangled by fear and pain. I would chain every selfish, thoughtless person to a sickbed just to show them what true fear looks like. But even in my health, I am afraid. My mind is breaking. GOD HELP—I'M ONLY 17 YEARS OLD!!!