𝓐𝓯𝓽𝓮𝓻 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓛𝓪𝓼𝓽 𝓒𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓽, 𝓐𝓷𝓸𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓻 𝓚𝓷𝓸𝓬𝓴

the day has already been
too many days stacked inside one body.
my spine keeps the record
of every leaned-in sentence,
every breath held longer than it should have been.

my hands remember
the weight of doors opening, closing, opening again—
the incessant clickety-clacking on the keyboard—
each one a small surrender of time
i no longer feel i own.

there is a version of me
that wants to stop here,
to let the clinic settle into silence
like a room after stormy weather.
to sit with the honest exhaustion
that does not ask permission.

but then another knock.
another, "oh, by the way, doc..."

not loud.
not dramatic.
just human.

and i think of how often pain arrives
without checking the schedule,
how illness does not respect the architecture
of “later” or “i’m already behind.”

so i rise again
not like a hero,
but like something more fragile than that—
a body choosing duty
with its edges frayed, bruised, and battered.

each patient is a question
i do not feel fully resourced to answer.
each encounter is a negotiation
between what i can give
and what i wish i could withhold
just to survive the next hour.

still, i enter.
still, i sit.
still, i listen.

because somewhere beneath fatigue
there is a quieter contract
written long before i learned how to bill time:

that presence and attention itself is medicine
even when imperfect,
even when abbreviated by exhaustion,
even when i am only half the person
i intended to be this morning.

i listen anyway.
i examine anyway.
i try to mean it anyway.

and in the brief space
between symptom and story,
i remember:

care is not the absence of depletion.
it is what we do when depletion is already there.
_________________________

Latin etymology:
- passion → 𝓅𝒶𝓈𝓈𝒾ℴ̄ → "to suffer"
- compassion → 𝒸ℴ𝓂 + 𝓅𝒶𝓈𝓈𝒾ℴ̄ → "to suffer with"