This, too, is life! Shh!

By Emmanuelle

Friend, if I could, I would take you by the hand and lead you to this place, my place.

Enter this gate, and walk through paths that had withstood the pounding of decades – of feet, of cars, of wheeled beds and fast-rolling stretchers.  Here, run your fingers over these cream-colored walls. Actually, it’s dirty white. Once long ago, it was really white.

You are touching history! These walls had been here long before the slit-eyed invaders had thought to crater its surfaces and corners with the whack of their bullets and the thump of their bombs. The walls were so thick the metals just dropped snubbed. The invaders tried to ease their guilt though. Six decades later, they build the most stunning structure therein to cure the critical national eye. The Opthalmology Department stands both proud and humbled, with mirrors for walls, no spy lurking beyond.

The right building is where they roll the blanketed bodies of the unclaimed. Stark-naked, they float lifeless thereafter in vats and pools until they float no more. Nameless and so very dead, they tutor the healers.  Their bones and veins and flesh to the least of the eyelash – so very useful to the last.    

Sometimes though, their souls wander around. And oftentimes they end up tailing an intern’s white coat to home, where it looms wonderingly lost at the foot of the bed. But again, that is another terrifying story waiting to be told. 

Pass through lines of concrete huts to house the fraternities and sororities.  The need to belong does not spare even the most gifted, here where they most belonged. 

And now, at last, before you cross from the college to the hospice, my patch of heaven on earth. By my glee, you would think Eve’s apple was worth the bite.

Under the shades of ancient trees that had taken root at the same time as the thick walls of the library alongside were poured, wooden slabs of tables and benches so thick as to defy anay. We rest the laptop on one not-so-smooth surface. Our lips smirk as our eyes debate the merits of Mic over Mac.  His Poshness, my HP, lights up with borrowed Smartness from the college.

Here they swarm! Not flies, but white pants and scrubsuits, the more outrageous color or design the better. They buzz, they crowd around. They too have heard of one or more of them immortalized within this file of true stories. Children not my children but how I wish they were! They   hug, they pat, they rub the back, they squeeze. I hug, I pat, I rub their backs, I squeeze back. They have no time for love in their lives. They do have time for tears and giggly laughter after just seconds of speed reading.  

Library at the right, canteen at the left, research and rich dessert just a few steps away, need one wish for more? Time out only to squash a mosquito, to squint at it. If its stripped, it’s dengue. If  it’s just black and frighteningly hairy, it’s malaria. One lives for another day.

When our bottoms numb from sitting too long, hunched over His Poshness, we cross the gate over to the other side. Where doctors or near-doctors, nurses and all attendant sorts, lord over all germs, mean and mighty. I mean, the germs.

This other, too, is life. Shhh! Walk softly. Viruses sleep light, and bacteria suck tight.   

(Readers may reach columnist at jingmil@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/
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