24/09/25- In honor of the two fearless bottles I bought tonight.
Midnight.
It’s almost midnight. I have to get to Grandma’s shop before she closes.
The surrounding area of my room is quiet except for the smell. Someone on the ground floor of G Block is cooking efo riro, and underneath it, I can smell the faint char of beans someone forgot on the fire. A burst of laughter comes from one of the rooms as I pass, then another voice, low, rhythmic, and feminine. I don’t stop to hear the rest. I know what I came out for.
The black tank beside F block catches my eye in the moonlight. A guy I don’t recognize is fetching water at this hour, a bucket in front of him, a yellow keg at his side. I nod. He doesn’t look up.
Rude.
In the quadrangle, the chess benches are occupied; two guys are hunched over a board, with a third one watching with his chin in his hand. I know the three of them. One of them calls out to me; we briefly greet each other. A girl is beside them, with notes open in front of her like she came for something else and stayed for the game. It’s midnight on a Thursday, and everyone is still trying to figure something out.
I get to Grandma’s shop and scan her freezer, the one with the sliding transparent door. No Fearless. My chest tightens. I have to get to Fatman’s before he closes too.
I take the pathway from Grandma’s into the side entrance of the cafeteria. Fatman’s shop is in the middle of the cafeteria. The LED lights buzz overhead, waiting for their first epileptic victim. I check his fridges; The Coke display fridges with the transparent doors. I pull out two Red Bull cans, cold and slick with condensation. His thick fingers drum against the table as I pull out my phone and transfer to his OPay. I walk away, already tearing at the tab of the first drink.
I leave the cafeteria through one of the two main exits. There are a couple of people playing at the pool table. I turn left towards my room.
The first sip burns as sweet chemical fire goes down my throat. My AirPods are still in — I forgot — and through them, barely audible: “One day I am gonna grow wings, a chemical reaction.” Thom Yorke of Radiohead, singing all the emotions I refuse to feel. I swallow and keep walking. The burnt beans still smelling; the voices in the room turned a mixture of creaking, slaps, someone panting, and feminine excitement.
My laptop screen glows blue in my dark room, the cursor blinking on page one of one hundred and twenty-three. Chemical Pathology. Due tomorrow. The second can opens before I finish highlighting the first paragraph.
1am.
The first chapter: disorders of plasma proteins. “Hypoalbuminemia results from decreased synthesis, increased catabolism, or abnormal distribution across fluid compartments.” I highlight it. I highlight the next line. I highlight the line after that until the whole paragraph is yellow, and I realize that I have not retained a single word.
I pick up my orange highlighter. Another can. The hiss echoes in the silence of my room.
I read again. The liver fails to synthesize. The fluid shifts into spaces it was never meant to occupy; third spacing — that’s how Gemini explained it to me. The phenomenon of losing volume into a compartment where it becomes physiologically useless. I write the phrase in my notes. Third spacing. I highlight it. My handwriting still looks normal here. This is the last hour it will be.
My phone buzzes. Mom’s name on the screen. I swipe away and reach for the highlighter again. What surfaces instead is my father. The specific image of him squeezing lemon into his green tea, the way he’s going to in the morning.
I think about the fact that I will one day sit across from someone dying and be the person who has the words. I will know what to say because I will have studied what to say. Because I am studying what to say and what to do. But no one teaches you what to do with the silence afterwards. Nobody teaches you how to be alone in a room at 1am and not feel it pressing against your chest. You tell them — yourself — that it’s okay.
I’ve watched people die. Several times, in fact. It’s never okay.
2am.
Empty cans line my desk like silver tombstones. My hands shake as I turn the page. The tremor makes my handwriting look like a doctor’s prescription sheet. I press harder with the pen until it tears through the paper.
Another can.
Cellular response to stress. “When a cell is overwhelmed beyond its adaptive capacity, it enters a state of irreversible injury. There is a point past which normal function cannot be restored.” I read the sentence twice. I write it in my notes, and as I do, I see myself on the screen of my laptop. My reflection stares back from the black window. Sunken cheeks and eyes that look like they belong in someone else’s skull. When did my face become this stranger’s? The Red Bull logo catches the light. The two bulls are charging at each other, forever locked in collision.
“We never learn; we’ve been here before,” Harry Styles blasting through my ears.
4am.
My phone screen shows no notifications. No messages. No missed calls. The silence feels heavy. It weighs on me; not all the time, but most times. Every day I come back home to nothing and nobody. Silence greets me. It always will.
Everyone says burnout is normal. But what if this isn’t burnout. What if this is just who I am now: mediocre, forgettable, perpetually on page one while everyone else is publishing papers. The gap keeps growing, and I don’t know how to explain that I am drowning when everyone around me seems to be breathing just fine. Maybe they are. Maybe I am the only one who doesn’t know how to do this. Maybe I never did.
We are meant to hold dying people’s arms and tell them it will be alright. That is what they are training us for. But the thing that they don’t tell you is that you can know every pathophysiology of every failure and still not know how to keep yourself together.
“Just stop your crying, it’ll be alright” is deeper in the song now, and I can’t tell whether it’s coming from my AirPods or the beyond. But the fake plastic trees are melting, and all I can do is watch.
The textbook: “Irreversible cell injury is characterized by the inability to restore mitochondrial function, resulting in failure of the sodium-potassium pump, cellular swelling, and eventual membrane rupture.” I look at the words; the words look back at me. Behind me, my bedroom looks like it belongs to someone I used to know.
My pulse hammers against my temple. A hundred beats per minute. I checked it once in a physiology practical. Now I feel it trying to break through my ribs.
“Remember to call home,” my phone reminds me silently. Remember.
6am.
The sunlight creeps through the little space past my green curtains, casting shadowy shapes on my notes. It’s about a ten-minute walk to the hospital. The morning air outside G block is different from the midnight air. The efo riro smell is gone, replaced by the lighter smell of soap and the early morning breeze as people begin to wake up in small shifts. The water tank at F block is empty and still. The chess benches in the quadrangle are abandoned, and the notes left behind by whoever was studying there were fluttering slightly in the early breeze.
“You know where you are with, floor collapsing, falling, bouncing back.” I let the song play, letting Radiohead run through my head a second time. The song that started the night, arriving again at the end of it.
The woman who sells moi-moi near the gate is already around, shouting “hot moi-moi” with a voice so loud it’d put opera singers to shame. I have walked this route so many times. The air outside tastes clean, untainted by artificial sweeteners and chemical energy of the night before. The faint hospital smell creeping in to ruin the beauty of the morning. Below, Grandma arranges bottles in her freezer, their silver bodies gleaming.
I climb the stairs to the fourth floor. One flight, two flights, the sound of the hospital morning getting louder and then quieter as I go higher. By the fourth floor the corridor is empty. The exam is in three hours. Outside, the city is still asleep.
I walk to the railing and stand there for a while. The wind catches my hair and my clothes, lifting them like they’re trying to carry me somewhere else. For a moment, I’m weightless. If only my future were as certain as gravity.
Maybe this is what flying feels like.
Below, Grandma will close her shop at midnight. Someone else will rush to beat the closing time, will grab Fearless bottles from her freezer, and will transfer to her Moniepoint — the 588 one — with trembling fingers, just like I did.
But I won’t need to buy any Red Bull tonight. Finally, I’ll get some rest.
