ordinary life

Last term, I had a classmate named C.  We worked in the same group for four months during anatomy.  He had failed the class more than twice and apparently, last year had been his last chance.  No one really knew why he had failed.

He knew a lot about bones and he was good at peeling human skin.  He knew exactly where to find the nerves; it was as though he was wearing special glasses that showed him where they were.  We all respected him.

But then around the time we started dissecting the brain, we began to realize that he didn't necessarily know everything.  He seemed to pretend he knew things he didn't.  When he was asked to do a sketch, he would submit the same thing over and over, no matter what the professor said. The title would say nerves but the main thing in his picture would be muscles colored in pink and purple.  Soon, he missed a class.  One of the professors came to tell us that he was "delicate" and that we should support him.

He didn't miss too many classes after that, but he would come to the lab sometimes to just sit there.  He would hold a pen instead of a knife and check off his list of must-remember muscles or organs while other members of the group bent over the corpse for hours and did their tasks.

Once when I was in line to wash the knives and tweezers and whatnot, he came and stood in line with me to wash a container.  When our turn came, we started washing side by side.  He finished in five seconds while it took me five minutes.  He didn't offer help; he just walked away and went back to the table to wait.  But I knew he wasn't being mean or anything.  It just didn't occur to him that I would be happy if he had helped me.

On another occasion we dissected the digestive organs together (he actually came out of nowhere to help me, only because he had been in charge of them for the past couple years).  He stood next to me with a hose in his hand and watched while I cut the intestines.  He would kindly tell me once in a while that I should wash my hands because I had poop on them.  I asked him if he could make more water come out of the hose so I could wash the intestines rather than my hands.  It took him ages.  He kept instructing me to put all the organs into one container so I wouldn't mess the table.  Soon, I realized the whole group of organs had stool all over so asked him if everything looked alright.  He didn't mind the organs getting messy (as long as the table was safe).  After all, it had been his third time to wash intestines.

When a guy asked how many meters of intestines that amounted to, he laughed and answered maybe as long as the earth's equator.  Really?  So all you do is poop washing?  C just laughed again.  It seemed to me like he never really saw what was behind people's words.

But he had a girlfriend of seven years who apparently called him Darling (kind of cheesy and mushy in Japanese).  He told us about her during Christmas dinner after catch-up anatomy; he had actually come in late because of a date he had had the night before.  He even told us where he was planning to propose to her and how he was almost ready if only he could pass anatomy.  He dreamed of living an ordinary life with her.  They would have kids and when they grew up, he would retire and enjoy his life a couple of years and die.  He was already in med school but becoming a doctor was still his "dream".  Everything he said, he was serious about.

When I found out that he had passed anatomy, I was thrilled.  Maybe I feel kind of sorry for his future patients but when I remembered what he had told us about his life on Christmas, I felt happy for him.  Lately, I heard he had failed another test and was repeating another year, but every time I see him walking alone by the library or eating alone in the canteen hunching over his tray, I still hope he will find a good life - the ordinary life he dreams of.