The Fall

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A brick the color of dried blood

slipped from a careless hand.

Six feet of air

became a guillotine.

He fell chasing it,

arms reaching

for a tomorrow

that was already gone.

Concrete caught him

like the earth remembering

it was once

a grave.

The crack

was intimate,

wet,

almost tender.

His spine snapped

the way a mother’s voice snaps

when the child she carried nine months

is suddenly, brutally, taken.

22/M.

Still tasting the sandwich

of a life

half-eaten.

Dust in his mouth,

diesel in his lungs,

mud on his boots

that would never carry him home again.

The cranes kept singing their iron hymns above him.

The city kept building itself taller.

He lay at the bottom of everything

and the sky did not even blink.

They slid him under lights

that bleach even sorrow.

He smelled

of sun and endings.

I drew the pin

like a knife

across the country

of his skin.

At T7

the world tore in half.

Above, still his;

below, already a ghost.

He watched my face

the way the crucified watch the nails.

His eyes, twenty-two and suddenly ancient,

carrying the funerals of every goodbye he’d never reach.

He tried with everything.

Teeth clenched, veins bursting,

a prayer screamed silently through every muscle.

The legs lay there like traitors who had already changed sides.

His voice

cracked open,

raw as a wound

begging for salt.

I gave him the no

I have never forgiven myself for giving.

It fell between us and kept falling,

a stone dropped into a well with no bottom.

I never

saw him again.

That is the cruelty

we sign up for.

We open the heart,

we close the story,

we stay behind with the silence.

But his silence became a haunting.

I feel him at 3 a.m.

when the room

is quiet enough

to hear hearts break.

I feel him learning to breathe

through a body that betrayed him,

learning to laugh again

(God, how dare he laugh again).

I feel the first morning he woke and did not beg the skies for mercy.

I feel the first time he wheeled into sunlight

and the sunlight bent down to meet him,

ashamed of what gravity had done.

I never saw it,

but I carry it the way

a widow carries the shape of a hand

that will never again touch her face.

The wound

had become a mouth.

And he will learn

to breathe fire through it.

He will never walk again.

Let that sentence burn

every comfortable heart that reads it.

Let it scald.

Let it brand.

But inside the cage,

where legs used to be,

a man

is still rising.

Rising with the slow,

unstoppable fury of a tide

that was told the moon had died

and answered by drowning the world anyway.

Six feet took his body.

He will answer

with six million feet

of soul.

I may never see him, let alone stand.

But every night since,

when another boy arrives broken

and the room smells of dust and cancelled futures,

I feel him standing inside me.

Refusing to kneel,

refusing to finish the fall,

refusing to let the universe

have the last word.

He is

the scream

I never let out

in that trauma bay.

He is

the yes

I could not

give him.

He is

the spark that survived the crush of bone and chance,

the flame that grew teeth when the world took his legs,

burning brighter than even the sun.

Fall if you must.

But never arrive.

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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

Disclaimer:

Patient details have been changed to protect confidentiality. This is a personal reflection, not medical advice or substitute for professional care.