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Brown is introspective, a bit afraid, a bit of dreading the future, unsure, sarcy.
A sharper tongue and more sensitive feelings than usual.
And add a nice dose of melancholy, loneliness and irritability to serve.
Brown, to differentiate from black, synonymous with anger, rage, or deep sorrow.
Or blue, synonymous with all pervasive lack of joy and happyness most commonly called being depressed.
So.. Brown.
All through internship, the one constant series we watched was House MD - obsessively, in fact.
I remember rushing back from the ward at 1:00 am in the night to watch one episode with my friends before collapsing, exhausted, to sleep. We watched all three seasons in that room in MIQ, with the sound of construction work going on outside. Noodles, too sweet tea, and the occassional iced coffee. And trying to figure the diagnosis out - 
I can count the ones i figured out on the fingers of one hand.
I’ve missed watching and guessing. The dvd’s aren’t that much fun to watch all alone.
Lack of TV’s caused all of us to miss the 4th season, but hooray for transcripts on the net !
Today was rather awfully bland.
Nothing happened.
Very nondescript, grey kind of day.
Dreamed a lot, that’s probably why.
This kind of day always leaves me discontent.
Like a huge waste of time, of having done nothing, simply wasting time and energy in nothing.
Waste of space and breath and time, such an awful blip in the whole time continuum.
I’d rather go to bed having done something.
Anything.
This’s the kind of day that filled all my yesterday’s last year.
And all I remember of it is Grey.
Moss.
Dreary.
Drops of water into a vessel with a hole.
In and out.
To what end?
Nothing gained, nothing lost.
Everything wasted.
Grew fat on idleness and discontent and dreams of what could’ve, should’ve been.
Sloth.
Never in the present -
Always in the Past - what might’ve been.
Or in the Future - unrealistic, misty pink versions of happiness easily achieved and obstacles that shimmer away into nothingness.
Pipe dreams that shrivel away in the cold daylight of reality,
Dreamed by a dreamer with too much time and too little will.
I’m just melancholy right now.
Today, I dreamed.
Dreams of discontent.
What a waste.
I was driving back to hospital campus when the accident happened.
The small road into campus opens at a 90 degree angle to the main road, and we can almost never see if any vehicle is coming into the road from the hospital courtyard. I rely on a generous use of the horn and creeping along till I can see the road.
This is a rather high risk area and accidents have been known to happen- and this is where I would have expected an accident, if anyone had asked me earlier today.
A bike came along the main road - and here is where time froze. The bike never stopped nor slowed down. The front wheel hit the car bumper that wasn’t fully turned into the side lane - and I - I froze. I do not remember whether I floored the brake or just kept pressing it like I already was.
One heartbeat, and then another. I remember feeling disembodied and watching the car take what seemed like the space of two heartbeats to come to a full stop. Both riders had been thrown off, and the bike was half on them and half on the ground. The pillion rider, a teenager - 16 or maybe 17 got up, he was fine.
The driver just lay there, groaning.
Everyone from surrounding houses came running towards us - this boy, this man groaning and me - shell shocked and completely useless. My brain had gone into complete meltdown. There are a probably a hundred times that I have seen Road Traffic accident victims, and basic training should’ve kicked in. It didn’t.
I stood there, my hands shaking, as a hundred scenarios ran through my head. Head injury? Cervical cord, spine? Maybe abdomen, blunt injury - and a part of my brain that was still vaguely, calmly doing the out of body, so lets discuss this case and find out what’s wrong part was telling me that I need to look out for the spleen and liver and make sure they are fine - or maybe fractures? They pushed the car out of the way, removed the bike off him, and he just lay there. Incoherent, groaning. My brain by now had settled for my definitive diagnosis - head injury, will require a CT scan, and God knows how many fractures.
A lot of people started yelling to take him to hospital - by which they meant a medical college or something equivalent. Another said to take him to mine, at which time I opened my mouth for the first time and said that I would see how he was.
Part of brain doing the out of body thing said to me that I couldn’t be the attending doctor, it would be conflict of interest. Another thought despairingly of spending all that time driving him to another bigger hospital, and what could possibly turn out to me paying for the scan and the bills - oh and I only had Rs 500 with me right now, but yes, I had my salary sitting in my room so maybe…
It took 5 people to move him. His hands and legs hang limply as they carried him into the ER.
My heart had fallen into my toes by now, and had gone from doing the fastest tapdance ever to the slowest, most hesitant, I’m being forced to dance with you though I hate you so here goes - the most shuffling, slow and disagreeable waltz you could find.
He was put in the examining room, and I told the doctor on duty what had happened.
She took one look at him and asked : Are you drunk? How much did you drink today?
And our man, of the limp hands and legs and the groans that made me shake, opened his eyes happily and told her he was on his way back from the local toddy shop.
He was absolutely, completely, and irritrievably drunk out of his gourd.
Other than some skin off his right heel, he was completely healthy. ( and quite happy, I might add )
Not a scratch anywhere else on his body. And I do mean that. Not even a tiny bit of skin off anywhere else on his body. No sign of cranial injury, no fractures, and certainly no blunt trauma anywhere.
My knees buckled in relief.
My world had tilted back again, almost.
With relief came anger, fear, and the desire to pound into his head to Never ever drink and drive again.
I did something I am not proud of.
I yelled at the boy - his son? grandson? for not making sure he didn’t drink. And for letting him drive after having drunk so much. He was young, like I said earlier 16/17. He was scared, and my yelling, didn’t help much. I snapped, and yelled rather loudly, and in front of a lot of other people. It was really not the best way to deal with the whole situation.
It took my hands an hour to stop shaking.
Even now, images run through my head. What if is a rather common motif of my thoughts right now.
What if I had sped up a little on the way back, or just stopped and waited to finish my coffee at the cafe instead of putting it in the car to finish later? I might have missed him.
What if he was going faster when we collided, or I was? What if he had been thrown forward onto my car? or a wheel of mine gone over him?
What if I had floored both clutch and brake at the instant we collided?
What if he had fallen onto granite or against the brick wall instead of the soft mud that certainly cushioned his fall?
What if he hadn’t gotten drunk and come haring down the road, ignoring the blinking signal and the car turning into the road and had instead slowed down, just for those few moments?
It will take sometime for me to tamp down these what if’s and all the scenarios that had run through my head as I saw him lying there groaning.
I will always remember this everytime I turn into campus.
I will remember this everytime I look at my front bumper. Which by the way, is totalled. Replacing it will cost me a bunch. His bike front license plate was twisted. It is otherwise untouched.
I should just try and forget it, and thank God he is fine.
I need to learn to curse fluently.
Since I will never have the guts to do it aloud in English, I need to learn another language.
Right now Italian sounds good.
What else do you do when you waste 3 days and try to finish what should’ve been done in 5 days in 2?
Eccl 3:2 …..a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.
and I am running so late in the planting, and not plucking up that which needs to be thrown away very efficiently.
There have been occasions in life when things become clear all at once to me, when I realise my own foolishness and just how blind I am. It is as if then everything becomes clearer, and the way behind me which has cost me a great deal of heartache and headaches suddenly begins to make sense, and while it certainly isn’t all flowers and well paved walks in the garden, it certainly is the equivalent of a fog lifting and the gray clearing from the landscape, and at least now I can see the trees.
And there is hope, for there is a path forward, and I am no longer lost and floundering in the grayness.
There are those who told me that the 2 years spent after finishing internship mould you into the person you are for the rest of your life.
There is so much that has happened to me in these years ( and I have more than 6 months left ) that it seems like a rollercoaster that plunges me from one mess into another, with highs and lows and sudden nerve wracking dips that have made me positively nauseous. What I will remember most is what I have learnt, and these sudden epiphanies that leave me in cold sweat.
Today, sitting in hospital, with a tension headache coming on just thinking of stuff, I remembered these verses - and there is a lot that makes sense now.
While my professional life goes on like it always had, there has been a couple major upheavals in my personal life. Every line of makes a point to me that I am only now beginning to discover.
There is so much that needs to be planted, healed; and that needs to be plucked away and broken down.
Ecclesiastes :
3:1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
3:2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3:3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
3:4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
3:5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
3:6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
3:7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
3:8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
I plan to write it all down, under each verse, and I fear that it will take up many a page.
It is something I need to do.
Thank God He ain’t the leaving kind.
And somehow, life is all right again.
Thank God for people being not on pot.
I am happy. Stupidly , absurdly, smile without a reason, Happy.
Oh what wouldn’t I do to just have an intelligent conversation with someone. Any one!
Why is that sometimes too much to ask for?
This, my dear, is what happens when the guy you vaguely think you can have intelligent conversations with ( and with whom you do have intelligent conversations with, just that it is all in your head,) turns out to be… rather insipid. And not at all like you imagined.
And your best friend treats you like a chair. A chair ! Just like something comfy and old and reliable.
But I don’t want to be a chair.
A chair is old and boring and stable and has four feet and I don’t know, is made of wood ! :-l
Ooof.
How hard is it to get one person who can keep me interested for more than 5 min ?
For a conversation that I can look forward to, that can make me smile and think and just break this monotony.
Day in, day out.
I am sick of having conversations with myself, of wondering and dreaming and thinking all in my head alone.
I just want one person to talk to.
I hate that sometimes I feel like life is somehow passing me by.
I hate that I feel like that despite having so much to do, and so much to finish and so much to look forward to.
I hate this, this feeling of wanting to run away, but not knowing where and to whom.
I hate that I know one of my friends is feeling lonely and lost too, and what I hate even more is that I really can’t say anything to make her feel better, because right now, I am very blind. Can I find the words? Do I really want to? I know that all that matters is to listen, but I can’t reach out, dial those numbers. Am I more scared of being pulled down, down into that deep dark vortex of frustration and grief and general messedupness that at this moment our lives seem to be? Can I reach out, though I am not whole, though sometimes (right now) I cannot stand, but only kneel? When all I want to do is pull the covers over my head and sleep.
I hate being this person who cannot reach out right now.
I hate this compromise I make when I message another friend, telling him to call her, though he has had a rather rotten past few days himself.
I hate that despite writing this post I do not call her immediately, and instead wait ( for what? ) another hour to call her.
foto credit : electrosmack1
