Anatomy of a healer's heart

There's a beat to the pulse beneath the skin,
how I stride through these corridors
with measured paces, memorizing the contours of muscles and bones,
carving roads into my head
as I inscribe them on the pages of a textbook.

They tell us that we are learning how to save lives.
But some days, it seems like we are learning
how to balance on the edge of our own.

Sleepless nights in pieces of time,
stack hour, caffeine-strapped study sessions—a fragile surgical tool dividing the fine line
between exhaustion and persistence.
There's the big, buzzing hum of glowing fluorescent lights
under our eyes, but our hearts are full of something fierce, a fire quietly burning deep within.

We try to survive by finding beauty hidden where it hides,
in brief moments, like when the sun drips through the library window:
and you stop for just a moment,
to breathe in the light.
Or when you drink a cup of chai with friends,
the laughter rising like steam,
you forget for a moment the weight of the stethoscope
that always hangs, always calls.

The cadavers don't teach us the weight of life,
they teach us the fragility of it,
that beneath every cut, every diagnosis,
is a person who once stood
just as I do now.

Yet there are perks we hold on to,
not rewards but reminders,
of the music that plays in our empty rooms,
gentle melodies to tell us there's a lot more
to this than the perfect line.
Of the smell of rain on days when we've nowhere to be
but here, within ourselves.

Yes, we're learning to heal,
but we're learning how to live.
And so we lengthen out our days to something like the tendons of our hands,
but fill with moments between,
like sly glances at the sky
through windows of this place we call
a second home.

And so we make do.
We find our laughter in the sterile air,
our reflections not in anatomy books
but in the stories we share
with ones who walk this path.

Life doesn't wait for us.
but we have learned how to catch glimpses of it
in every step we take.