They say life is all about the choices you make. It’s about the sacrifices you hold dear, the luxuries you forgo, the pain you endure and the lessons you learn.
5 years ago, when she stepped into this school, her eyes first spotted the notice board to search for information about the registration process. She’s sure nobody noticed but if they had, they would have seen the pride in her eyes that she had felt.
She still considers it as one of her biggest achievements, to have studied at SPHMMC no matter how much she had disliked it some times. It’s a recurrent, rather redundant theme in whatever she writes. It’s like they say, your heart always goes back to the places you love.
2 and a half years of basic science what could have been teenage angst and days of personal development lost to ደረቅ ሽምደዳ.
Does she regret it? No.
Does she still want to go back in time and maybe, live a little? Yes.
Clinical year helps her to witness what she likes to call, the magic of medicine. She may have written a lot about this, she may have told you a lot of times but she doesn’t want to stop. She had seen people pass away with fewer odds against them. She had seen a man at the verge of death walk away on his own two feet just after a few injections.
She wishes life were white and black, where you could label things as they were, not in hues of grey where you lose sight of the color you were looking for, in the first place. For every passion you chose, you lost sight of another passion. The one that you love with the same fervour and same innocence as the first.
For her, it meant the love for writing that she wishes to fill inside of her but in vain. She thinks back of all the open mics she has missed because she has to study or was too tired to go to after a long day at school. She thinks of all the times she has written in the past year feeling like she was wasting time but loving it anyway.
An extreme case of cognitive dissonance where studying makes her want to write poetry and all the while worried if she is wasting time and should get back to studying.
Or where she loves going to school but also loves staying back home listening to her brother’s silly jokes, her mother’s kindness that makes her feel like the luckiest girl on the planet. She is sometimes a giddy little girl, in love with too many things at the same time.
Or when she would love to self quarantine herself and read all the books she’s been meaning to read and all the words she’s been wishing to write, yet she also wants to be here,at school.
Smarter people would say life is all about ‘balance’. But life is also short, and time is just too little and one lifetime some times isn’t enough.
If she is making any sense, she doesn’t understand or if there are any more unfortunate impatient souls like her, she doesn’t know but the fact that this piece has seen the light of day means that she has successfully stolen a few moments of respite, to breathe into an empty space for a victory lap, a cry of celebration that she is here and she is alive and she will make it amidst this labrinth of ideas and responsibilities that will always keep millions like her from acknowledging life as it comes and from finding the best in the little things.
Take it while knowing that not many could afford the chance, that they died without realising what had hit them, unplanned and unfinished with all the things that they ‘wanted’ to do.
Take it, celebrate life and realise that never in the history of our lives was ever doing so little, enough to accomplish so much.
Haymanot Girma @HakimEthio
