The Man in the Mirror

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The shift has ended.

The corridor sleeps.

I stand at the washroom sink,

staring at the mirror.

Hands soaked in blood.

I don’t remember whose.

The water runs red, then pink, then clear.

It feels wrong to call it cleansing.

t’s erasure.

A ritual of forgetting before the next beginning.

I see a reflection.

He looks like me, but stiller,

like someone who’s been watching

for a very long time.

For a while,

neither of us speaks.

Then he smiles faintly,

and I know the conversation has begun.

“Long night?” he asks.

“They’re all long,” I reply.

“Or maybe you’ve simply forgotten what short feels like.”

He isn’t cruel.

Just precise.

The way truth often is,

when you’ve run out of excuses.

He leans closer,

his gaze steady, unflinching.

“Tell me,” he says,

“who are you when you’re not needed?”

The question bruises on contact.

Because I don’t know.

Because the world never waits long enough

for me to find out.

Once, I thought I was a doctor because

I wanted to heal.

Now I suspect I became one

to feel indispensable.

There’s comfort

in being needed.

It spares you the terror

of wondering who you are without the need.

“You’ve made a home out of urgency,” he says.

“And now you mistake the silence for loss.”

He’s right.

When the calls stop, when the corridor falls quiet,

I feel useless,

like a blade that’s forgotten how to cut.

“I gave everything I had,” I tell him.

“No,” he answers.

“You gave yourself away. There’s a difference.”

The light hums louder,

as if agreeing.

The tap drips

in rhythm with my pulse.

Somewhere,

a monitor beeps.

A sound that feels more familiar

than my own breath.

“You look tired,” he says.

“Tiredness isn’t the problem,” I answer.

“It’s the absence of meaning that exhausts me.”

He laughs softly.

“And yet you chase meaning every day, in places where even God hesitates.”

I want to argue,

but I don’t.

I think of the countless hands I’ve held,

the ones that went cold

despite my pleading,

and the ones that didn’t.

I think of how

I no longer flinch.

Of how calm I’ve become

in the presence of dying.

“Was I enough?” I ask him.

The man tilts his head, studying me.

“Enough for whom?”

The words hang like smoke.

Thick, unanswerable.

I realize I’ve been chasing approval

from a world that never looks back.

I wanted

the gratitude of the living,

but all I got

were their departures.

The man in the mirror disappears with the light,

and for a moment,

I see not my face

but the sum of all I’ve seen.

The pale children,

the trembling old,

the ones who screamed,

the ones who couldn’t.

Each one etched somewhere behind my eyes.

Dawn arrives, and with it, the light.

Pale, forgiving, tender.

The ER hums back to life,

and somewhere, someone calls my name.

I look once more into the mirror.

The man is still there, but softer now.

He looks almost kind.

Almost human.

“What happens if you take medicine out of you?” he asks.

I pause.

Silence.

Then, softly, I tell him,

“Maybe I remain.”

He nods.

“Then that’s enough.”

The light steadies. I turn off the tap.

The sink is clean now.

My hands are not.

But I’ve learned to live with that.

I walk out of the washroom,

leaving the reflection behind.

I know he will stay, waiting,

a silent custodian of all I’ve lost.

Outside, the corridor stretches ahead

like a sentence I must finish.

I walk toward it.

Because I must.

And maybe that’s what remains

after all the saving is done.

The courage

to go on anyway.

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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.