“That you had to…perform. When you’re feeling like this.”
“I feel great,” I say.
“Right. People always flee into dirty alleys when they’re feeling great.”
“The dumpster aroma boosts serotonin.”
A beat passes. “Ana.” His voice is gentle, a soft boop right in the center of my chest.
“I’m f—”
“Please don’t say you’re fine when we both know you’re not.”
The directness of his words catches me off guard. But Iamfine—I’m safe; I’m healthy; I’m in my hometown in a free country on the last leg of a successful tour for a bestselling book, reunited with the person who loves me the most in this world. On paper, life can’t get any better.
“I just needed a few minutes to myself,” I reassure him. “To recharge.”
“Recharge? Or gird yourself?”
“Gird myself for what? The event is over.”
“But the battle begins,” he says.
Before I can refute him, he continues. “That was out of line. I didn’t mean—but you should know…” He takes a breath. “Your book, your podcast,So Proud of Youas a concept. You’re casting a light into a lot of people’s lives. Maybe you’re not saving lives in an immediate way as a doctor, but you’re making lives a lot more livable. It’s important—it’s dire—to feel understood. And that’s what you’re giving people. Don’t let anyone tell you that’s not worth the immense effort you put into your work.”
His words are like a balm over scalded skin, soothing the worst of the burn.The path you chose was right, or at least okay. You’re okay.
Legs suddenly weak, I sink onto the cement parking block at my feet. He sits too, his thigh grazing mine. Solid, rooted, at my side.
“My dad died a few months before I dropped out of my residency,” I say. My voice sounds far away, snatched up by a passing car on the freeway.
Ryan is tuned in to me with his whole body. But he remains quiet, waits for me to continue. Patient. He’s so patient—my complete opposite, yet it’s something I’m appreciating more every day. He doesn’t insist or impose. He just lays open a path before me, inviting me to walk it if I so choose. Making it so easy to take the first step.
That must be why I keep talking, why I tell him—aloud—something I’ve never shared with anyone.
“When I got into med school, it was the first time I ever saw him cry. He was always stoic, taught from birth that strength means holding it together no matter the circumstances. Even when we immigrated here, even as they lost the only life they’d everknown, he weathered the storm like a lighthouse. My mom…” I pause, feeling guilty for revealing a piece of someone’s story that isn’t mine to tell, but knowing it’s necessary to explain my own. “Didn’t.”
Ryan’s warm hand settles between my shoulder blades, but he remains quiet.
“Grief overtook Mom. For a long time. Having to leave behind everything and everyone they knew, build a new life in a place that felt totally alien to them. It was hard on them both. But if my dad felt it, he never let it show. He got out of bed every morning, went to work, put food on the table. Provided. He may not have done it with a smile on his face, but he certainly never shed a tear. Until I got my acceptance letter from Harvard Med. He read it with glistening eyes and wrapped me up in the biggest hug I can remember.”
My nose prickles at the memory of his barrel chest, solid as a house. His khoungy scent, potent in the hairs poking out from the collar of his sweater. His beating heart against my ear. Alive.
“He never said it in words, but I know it made him proud. That his child was going to be a doctor.” An image of his dark eyes shining in the glow of the kitchen light assails me, and my stomach folds in on itself. “I’d always been self-motivated, but it drove me even harder knowing that I was giving him this…gift, after everything he’d given me. That I hadn’t squandered it—his sacrifice was worth it, I was delivering on the promise of ‘better’ for the next generation. An American Dream come true.”
Ryan rubs circles on my back again, the movement coaxing meon.
“I was halfway through my residency when he died. It was so sudden, his heart attack. So unexpected. His loss carved this…canyon into our lives. Mom needed me so much. I moved back home with her. I still went to work every day. I thought maybe the association with my dad would be a good thing—a way to stayconnected to him—but it went the opposite way. I just couldn’t hold it together.”
Every corner I turned in the hospital reminded me of him. Every chart I examined blurred before my eyes, every code on the PA system echoed in my ears, the smell of disinfectant stung my throat and threatened tears. He’d come to me in images so sharp I could barely breathe through them. There was no safe space. Not at work, and not at home. Mom needed me to be strong, sinking deeper and deeper into a Mom-shaped hole. Sized to hold her and only her.
Nathan and I had been living in a small apartment together for a couple of years by then. When it was clear how lost Mom was, living alone in the house she used to share with her family but that now felt hollow and haunted, I couldn’t leave her hanging. She was my mother, I loved her, and she was suffering. I needed to be there for her.Therebeing a relative term. I moved back in, took care of everything that needed taking care of, and kept my clouds at bay to spare her. But part of me was operating on a different plane altogether. One that hovered somewhere in midair, muted and bare. By myself.
Nathan was supportive at first, on the surface. Until it became too much to bear for me, the holding it together. Until I thought he might provide a safe space for me to fall apart a little. But Dad’s death took a toll on our relationship—the ultimate toll, as it turned out.
“When I saw the response to that first video I made…it was like a stone chipped away from the wall around me, letting in a tiny pinprick of sunlight. I felt a kind of good I hadn’t for months, since Dad passed. The more time I spent making videos, then starting the podcast and doing speaking events, the better I felt. These things didn’t carry the taint that medicine now did. They were fresh and different and mine. And even though it would have broken my dad’s heart to know I jumped ship before I ever becamea doctor, and my mom is clearly still not thrilled about it, and I don’t even know if it was the right thing to do…” I trail off, not sure how to put into words this aching need to follow what my heart was desperately screaming for.
“You couldn’t not,” he says softly, his palm vibrating against my back.
