- Dr. Adarsh Nath | Letters from the ER
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- The Cage
Click "Read Online" at the top of the mail for a better reading experience.I come back from the ER
at 09:17 p.m.
still tasting metal
and warm lights.
I shut the door and lock it.
The room is the same room
but tonight
it’s a mouth waiting to swallow.
Some nights the performance ends
without warning.
The face I rented for the day
slides off like wet paint.
I stand in the room and see the cage underneath.
Thin ribs of habit,
bars made of language,
a hollow built to look like a person.
All day I spoke in complete sentences,
laughed on cue,
signed my name
like it still belonged to me.
The night doesn’t ask permission.
It walks in,
turns the lights low,
and starts peeling.
First the smile.
Then the reasons.
Then the skin.
Then myself.
Silence moves into the room
like floodwater.
Thoughts that were asleep all day
wake up hungry.
They chew
through the floor
of every safe story
I ever nailed down.
I try to pray.
The words taste like cardboard.
I try to remember love.
It feels like a rumor from another lifetime.
I try to sleep.
Sleep laughs and locks the door from the inside.
There is only the raw fact,
that I am a temporary arrangement of meat
trying to convince itself
it is more than meat.
So I pick up
the only honest tool left.
The mind
turned against itself.
I cut open the idea that I am good.
Inside,
a child terrified
of being found out.
I cut open the idea that I am loved.
Inside,
a ledger of debts
I can never repay.
I cut open the idea that tomorrow matters.
Inside,
the same dark room
I’m standing in right now.
Every belief
bleeds the same color.
Every memory
smells like rot once you lift the lid.
The past
is a landfill.
The future
is a promise written on smoke.
I keep cutting
until there is
nothing
left to defend.
No country.
No name.
No god.
No story that ends with me still breathing.
I expected screaming.
There is only the soft click
of pieces falling into place
they were never meant to hold.
Past a certain point
thought becomes heavier
than blood.
You feel it
in the shoulders,
in the teeth,
in the marrow.
Meaning is not missing.
Meaning is irrelevant.
That is the worst
discovery of all.
The universe does not keep score.
It does not watch. It does not forgive.
It simply continues
while this small nervous system
invents reasons to stay animated for one more day.
Everything gentle collapses first.
Hope, faith,
the idea that suffering has a purpose.
They fold like paper houses in rain.
What remains is older.
Colder.
A reptile patience
that was here before language
and will be here after the last throat
stops trying to explain itself.
It does not comfort.
It does not condemn.
It simply waits
for the rest of me
to finish dying
of its own explanations.
The collapse is quiet.
No thunder.
No tears
worth mentioning.
Just the soft inward sigh
of a structure
finally admitting
it was never solid.
I am not the panic.
I am not the prayers.
I am not the person who once believed
those prayers would be answered.
I am
what is left
when every story
burns off like morning fog.
A watching.
A breathing.
An ancient animal curled inside the ribcage
that no longer needs a name
because no one is coming
to call it home.
There is no light inside.
Only the cold, wide clarity
that arrives
when every light
has been turned off on purpose.
And in that darkness something finally relaxes.
Not because it found answers.
Because it stopped
asking questions.
Questions
that were never meant
for creatures
made of meat and time.
The silence is not empty. It is complete.
And in that completeness
there is a strange, cold peace.
The only peace that never lied.
Hours later
the thoughts run out of blood.
The room tilts.
The ceiling drifts farther away.
I fall into the first real sleep
I’ve had in months,
not gentle, not merciful,
just absolute.
“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
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More soon.
Another moment.
Another reminder that we are still, somehow, human in all of this.
Yours,
Dr. Adarsh Nath,
Letters from the ER
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