Rediscovering the Merciless World in Times of Sickness

 

I. The Shutter and the Dawn

 

The shutter of the window was ajar, allowing fair rays of morning to slip through and land upon his middle-aged, handsome face.

As the sunlight’s warmth caressed his drowsy features, he heard a chorus of birds exalting the dawn with wholehearted devotion and jubilant praise.

 

They wove an auspicious hymn that heralded the new day, each note like a prayer, each trill recited with melodic, divine grace.

Handsome and gentle he truly was; he rose and drew the casement wide to hug the new day’s passionate embrace.

 

With meditative eyes, he embraced the light; his heart, steeped in reverence, admired each single beautiful thing.

The glorious celebration of morning poured within—resonant, vibrant, an inner flowering the newly born day’s dazzling rays would always bring.

 

He moved with hastened steps to the basin, blade in hand, the ritual of self made clear.

So eager to reach his work on time—his career not merely a job but devotion: professor, steward of literature’s sacred sphere.

 

For him, the lecture hall was a temple; literature his life’s axis, his lifelong, beloved soulmate.

His students, like bright children, bestowed upon him by generous fate.

 

Though solitude had engraved his life with deep, unerasable marks, his heart overflowed with mercy wide.

A tenderness unfeigned, an empathy that reached all living things—and even to the inanimate, the stones alike.

 

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II. The Mirror and the Swelling

 

He stood in front of the mirror and saw a countenance still carved by masculinity’s noble trace.

A quiet pride arose within him as the razor followed the contours of his fair face.

 

Yet when his hand reached lower—near the jugular vein—he felt a swelling there,

Semi-firm, painless, alien, as if a terrible thought had risen suddenly to lay itself bare.

 

An ominous protrusion mimicked normal flesh color, yet it said: behold, an intruder dwells within thy frame.

No ache, no cry—but evidence of malignant change; a subtle herald whispering his dreadful name.

 

For all his kindness and wisdom, a terrible terror lived deep within: the well-known, lonely men’s familiar fear,

that in a vast, indifferent world there would be no hand to reach out to him when sickness and vulnerability drew near.

 

The mind that years of social indifference and neglect had shaped amplified the terror of his malignant fall.

Each pulse in his veins and breath in his lungs became a scream: how could rescue come, if there were absolutely no one to call?

 

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III. The App and the Choice

 

He rushed frantically towards the presupposed immediate salvation—phone app’s medical gate—where clinics of the city wait,

The only logical solution for the urgent health disaster, a list of names that might annul his horrific fate.

 

With desperate urgency, he tapped the foremost oncologist whose repute filled pages wide.

He chose at once the most available one, dismissing all whose appointment that day would be denied.

 

For him to wait another minute was unimaginable torment: panic’s grip always made seconds feel like an eternal phase.

His limbs were shaking, his mind a haze; both his breath and his pulse were in a frantic survival race.

 

The thought of driving seemed madness; trembling hands would destroy the vehicle and kill the passersby.

So he forsook his car and sought public transportation, where strangers pressed and survival of the fittest was an existential fact no one could deny.

 

Within mere minutes, clothed and in the street, he was breathlessly running; the city swallowed him immediately in its hectic flow.

His pulse was still a drum of panic as he stepped where crowds at the bus station, like rivers, surge and go.

 

He boarded, blind to all around, intent on reaching where the clinic’s station align.

Pressed by throngs, he felt his chest compressed with careless social compression—a term his distressed mind could perfectly define.

 

At last he saw a vacant seat, a lifeline; mercy flashed across the aisle, a small and shining light at his narrow tunnel.

He moved with every shred of strength; the world around grew narrow, quick, malign,

And hope—so slight—fluttered like a bird against the iron bars of hard time.

 

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IV. The Stolen Seat

 

But fortune’s prize was often seen by others first; a young woman’s glance claimed the seat.

She was no more than twenty years, swift-footed, eyes aflame with youthful conceit.

 

To her he seemed her father’s age—a symbol of the men she loathed and longed to defeat.

For any man unworthy of the honorable title of prospective boyfriend must be fought against with fist and feet.

 

And in the holy code of her unprecedented generation, elders had become a burden on their everlasting youthful age.

Elders were considered mere chains and obligations, meant to spoil their eternal youthful grace.

 

Her lips curled slightly with defiance; she bolted and took the seat that might have mitigated his pain.

She dropped into the seat with triumph palpable, as if her little victory were a holy war’s historical gain.

 

Crossed legs, a swinging foot, her bubble gum like a bubble of contempt and disdain.

Her posture spoke of conquest, as if Hannibal had achieved an anti-Roman raid.

 

The seat became a throne; her phone, her whole universe, the altar around which the romantic idolatry must spin.

That slim rectangle—the world entire—where her past, present, and future must be woven, consecrated, unified one. 

 

Within its glow her “only god” resided, worshipped with a faith whole and sweet.

She adored the dust of his shoes, for he supplied the hunger her peer pressure called an irreplaceable need.

 

The stolen seat was not mere rest but proof—a victory over narcissistic fathers and the decrepit aged, as her omniscient media always repeat.

A token consecrated, a symbol, her glorious triumph offered to her only god, with countless selfies—a digital feat.

 

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V. Chorus of Distinct and Petty Crimes

 

Around her, the bus composed its chorus of distinct and petty crimes,

The young man who shoved everyone with gym-born pride, proclaiming his fruitful hours spent in iron-struggle times.

 

The elders shouted extremely loudly into the mics of their phones,

believing their personal issues must be shared with the whole bus, as long as the bus and its passengers constituted a legitimate constitutional right of their own.

 

“Why,” he asked within himself, “does life seem crueler when we break?

Or does weakness peel the mask away, so that cruelty and the heartless nature of the world are explicitly declared?”

 

Or is the world at its core unyielding, cold, and blind to compassion's gentle care,

Only showing care toward the strong, while granting none to those who really ache?

 

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VI. The Ascent and the Clinic's Hall

 

He left the bus with crippling pains, the city’s breath a humid, polluted air.

He ran the streets with desperate urgency, his chest in labor, lungs barely able to catch any fresh air.

 

No elevator could he wait for; impatience made stairs his only chosen road.

Six flights he climbed, each step offering a steep relief that decreased the intolerable stress of his unbearable load.

 

At last, the clinic’s sanctum—reception’s glare, 

a woman on the phone denied his sight.

She spoke on the phone about others’ appointments, the world of clients pressing hard in her ear.

 

Though he addressed her gently, affectionate voice, her patience thin and immediately dismissed his urgency away.

“Two hours,” she said, “six patients stand before thee”—she said in the typical tyrannical voice of enforced delay.

He sank into a chair like a stone, a knot of agony that would not go away.

 

Before him, mounted on the wall, the clinic’s screen proclaimed a film in play,

A foolish, insulting drama—far from comfort, far from anything that eased patients’ dismay.

 

Its plot absurd: a youth always beloved by women with black, short hair alone,

While neglected, mistreated, spat on his face by women who were fair and blonde—compelled, it seemed, to let such a person feel forlorn.

 

The patients watched as if they were enthralled; for moments they cast off their malignant tumors’ concerns,

And walked, absorbed in fiction’s folly, oblivious to their personal pains.

 

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VII. The Provocative Romance

 

An elderly woman by his side wept, lamenting the young man in the movie's unjust ordeal.

Her scarf wrapped tight around her head, her crying was warm, profuse, wholehearted tears.

 

He watched these patients’ eyes and thought: how strange that those who were wrestling with death,

In the waiting room, could find in that provocative, petty drama solace?

 

Thus the waiting room became a stage where folly wore no mask and call it exquisite art,

And serious sickness paled beside that play, a testament to what the crowd cruelly disregard.

 

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VIII. The Call to the Room

 

At last the voice: his name was called, the savior’s hour at last drew near,

Relief unknotted in his chest though terror still sat heavy and severe.

 

The doctor, behind his desk, was sitting and met him with a dignified, half-smiling face disclosed,

A presence calm, competent—the kind of trust in which hope is composed.

 

He led him through another room where the examination tools lay,

And asked the measured questions that the medical forms require to mark the patient’s day.

 

The doctor bade him rise and follow to the inner room where hands must test the state.

The examination’s ritual began with clinical, meticulous touch and professional care. 

 

Each motion measured, practiced—skill and silence mingled in the air.

But when at last the doctor’s hand pressed on that swelling near the lowly vein,

A darkening cloud crossed his brow; his manner shifted, heavy as a fearful fate would ordain.

 

He walked away, toward his desk, where waiting ink would mark what hands had seen,

And set to write a report that felt to his patient like ascending the guillotine’s platform in a horrific dream.

 

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IX. The Report and the Silence

 

In silence then the doctor wrote; his pen moved like a metronome of fate.

He wrote with steady script, a practiced hand that kept the patient’s unkept anxiety at wait.

 

The man, his voice a fragile, quivering reed, implored: “O doctor, tell me, what is this growth?”

He begged with shaking limbs: “I am a strong believer; give me truth—I’ll bear it patiently; this is my solemn oath.”

 

But still the pen was scratching the report on medical papers,

The doctor’s eyes were fixed on the page where his pen was still bound,

As if the room’s walls had swallowed the man’s sound and left the man’s plea in horrific agony drown.

 

The patient leaned with trembling breath: “Please—what is wrong? If sorrow must be mine,

I’ll accept the will of Heaven; let no false softness mitigate thy line.”

 

No answer came; the doctor seemed unhearing, fixed upon his written chart.

His face, a monument of duty, showed no compassion or fear—an insurmountable wall between his patient and his patient’s collapsing heart.

 

Anger flamed and rose—that quiet pleading hardened into fury keen.

He raised his voice, he shook the air: “Doctor!—answer me!” But still the same doctor’s unresponsive scene

Remained as silent as an ominous fate, the pen’s soft scratch a ceaseless, steady machine.

 

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X. The Breaking and the Fury

 

He stood beside the desk and poked the man; his fingers sought any reaction or any caring sign.

But the doctor was still writing as if untouched, his body calm, his mind just focused on the line.

 

The patient’s mind unraveled—madness crept along the edge of reason’s well-measured taste.

He fled the room; he sought the sobbing elder woman,

And without consent he seized her head and plucked a pin—from her scarf in but a fraction of a second, with urgent, unbelieving haste.

 

And fled back with fevered hand to where the physician sat, still writing his report.

He plunged the pin with desperate speed; he stabbed his hand, his back, his face—his very spinal cord.

 

He slapped and struck, he tore, he hit; his hands grew wild in passion and despair.

He seized a chair and smashed it down on the physician's head; he pulled his hair and delivered furious blows, well-measured and exceptionally fair.

 

The doctor stirred a little—just barely felt annoyed — like a shadow brushed his skin,

But never once he lifted eyes to meet the man who raged for truth extraction from the physician who firmly decided to bury the truth of his patient within.

 

The nurses stormed, followed by strong men who were waiting with their kin and relatives outside in the waiting room.

They seized the patient with hands of force and beat him down in shameful doom.

 

They dragged him out—through clinic, stair, and door—into the street where disdain and pain

clung to his torn and bleeding flesh; the world’s typical response to all his worry and suffering, the world’s never-changing, despicable game.

 

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XI. The Street and the Question

 

There in the dust, amid the roar of passing life, he lay with garments torn and stained.

His face, a crimson map of pain, his mouth and nose both bleeding, unchecked, untamed.

 

His body bruised and raw, the city watched with averted eyes,

And, broken more than flesh, the man asked the question that shaked the ever-watching skies:

 

“Does this damn world always seem like this?”—he cried with pain’s blazing breath,

“Or just our sickness, vulnerability, strip away the mask that hides its indifferent depth?

 

Do hearts turn colder only when we fall, or have they always been so stern?

Is it weakness that reveals a truth which health had long contrived to spurn?”