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There was a time I wanted to die.

A time I forgot to live.

Because life had become a ritual

I performed without belief.

Wake. Brush. Shower. Clothes.

Rehearse a fake smile.

I moved through the hours like a ghost wearing my own name tag.

Everything worked. Nothing lived.

People told me I was calm.

They said I handled chaos with grace.

But calm isn’t always peace.

Sometimes it’s paralysis.

A stillness that grows

when feeling becomes unbearable.

I wasn’t calm.

I was eroded.

Every night I came home

to the bean bag,

the only witness to my undoing.

No food. No texts. No calls.

Just me and the ceiling fan slicing air,

steady as a monitor tracing a flatline.

I sat there until exhaustion knocked me out.

Sleep wasn’t rest.

It was anesthesia.

There were nights

I wished morning wouldn’t come.

Because mornings meant

pretending again.

Sometimes the phone lit up.

“Adarsh, did you eat?”

My mother’s voice,

tender, far away and unknowing.

I stared at the screen

until the words blurred.

Eating required appetite;

I had ash in my mouth, choking my airway.

A friend texted once:

“Take it one day at a time.”

I wanted to ask:

“What if the days have stopped breathing?”

“What if every day is the same day, repeating endlessly?”

Inside the ER,

I was alive in a way that frightened me.

There, everything

was stripped naked.

A gasp, a pulse, a cry, a code.

Pain was organized. Death had a protocol.

It was the only place where life

still demanded something of me.

A patient’s heart stopped,

and the emergency room transformed.

No thoughts. No feelings.

Only instinct.

I moved with the team,

the rhythm of compressions echoing like a metronome.

And in that chaos, I found peace.

Because in there, meaning was immediate.

Every second counted.

And for a while,

so did

I.

When a pulse returned beneath my trembling fingers,

when a man’s chest rose again,

I felt something move

in the hollow I carried inside me.

A small, stubborn rhythm.

My own pulse.

Maybe not hope, but memory.

Of what it felt like to care.

Perhaps, that’s when I began to understand,

that everything on this earth has an expiry date.

Even pain. Even grief.

Even the darkness we convince ourselves will last forever.

The night I finally broke, it was quiet.

No storm.

No breakdown.

Just the mirror.

A face I didn’t recognize staring back.

Capable.

Competent.

Dead.

I remember whispering, “Enough.”

Just that.

Just certain.

A surrender that felt like resurrection.

So I began small.

I watered the plant that had learnt to live without me.

I replied to my mother: “Yes, Ma. I ate.”

It wasn’t true, not yet, but it was a promise that someday it would be.

Mornings passed,

and the plant had a bud.

A small, green defiance

in the middle of my ruin.

And I realized,

maybe resurrection isn’t divine.

Maybe it’s human.

A choice to feed what you thought was gone.

These days,

I still return home heavy.

I still feel the weight of my whole life.

The ceiling fan still hums too loud.

But now, I switch on the light.

I eat something simple. I sit beside the plant.

Sometimes it brushes against my wrist,

like it’s checking if I’m still alive.

And I am.

Not healed.

Not holy.

But alive.

My mother still calls.

“Adarsh, did you eat?”

And now I smile before I answer.

Because now, I always do.

Maybe that’s all resurrection ever was.

Not conquering death,

but feeding the life

that remained.

The small rituals. The quiet breath.

The light that refuses to go out.

The quiet pulse that says,

“I’m still here.”

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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.