The Country Remains
We are taught to read a body
like a country from above.
The river of an artery.
The border of disease.
The small dark province
that must not be allowed to spread.
We learn which roads can be closed,
which bridges rerouted,
how much land can disappear
and still leave something
we are willing to call whole.
On paper,
the maps are beautiful.
Clean lines.
Measured distances.
A legend explaining
what everything means.
But no map has ever had to live
inside the country it describes.
Months later,
a woman stands at the bottom
of her own staircase
and looks upward
as though someone has quietly
changed the altitude of her home.
Somewhere,
a note says she is doing well.
And perhaps she is.
Perhaps well is simply a word
with very generous borders.
At her appointments,
they ask about pain.
She says,
not really.
They ask about appetite.
Fine.
Her weight is stable.
The numbers behave.
No one asks whether she would
walk this road again
knowing where it leads.
So she keeps that answer
like a stone beneath her tongue.
How could she explain
that she is grateful to be alive
and sometimes wishes
she had chosen differently?
That both things can be true
without canceling each other?
There are losses
too small for the chart
and too large for a life.
The Sunday drive
she no longer has strength for.
The bathtub she is afraid
to lower herself into.
The grandchild who has learned
not to ask to be carried.
The body beside her in bed
that she loves
but does not recognize
as entirely hers.
From far enough away
the country looks saved.
I wonder how often
we mistake distance
for clarity.
How often we stand
over the map
and celebrate the road
still reaching the sea,
while somewhere below us
someone is standing
among the landmarks
of her former life,
trying to understand
how a place can still bear her name
and no longer
feel like home.
Sarah Ali is an MD/MPH student at the UAB Heersink School of Medicine. Through her writing, she hopes to bring greater attention to the lived experiences of patients and to the parts of illness and care that can be overlooked in clinical medicine.