▸ Column · The Hidden Leaf Village (Naruto shinobi world) — a veteran medical-nin after a mass-casualty disaster
ITACHI UCHIHA replies.
Replied to by Itachi Uchiha, with a rebuttal from Sasuke Uchiha.
The letter
I've been a field medic for the Leaf for eleven years, and I thought I'd grown enough scar over the soft parts to survive anything. Last spring a transport carrying academy children was caught in a collapse on the mountain road. Four of them I could not save. Now I cannot pass that stretch of road without my hands going cold on the reins. My squad held the proper debrief, I sat the sessions the hospital requires, I gave all the correct answers — and then I went home and started sleeping in the front room, because the moment I close my eyes on the mat I am back on that road. My partner has been patient, but last week I found her weeping at the hearth, saying she feels she lost me out there too, and that struck deeper than any of it. I love this work and I believe I am still steady on a call. But I am beginning to wonder whether holding myself together for a twelve-hour shift and then breaking apart in private for the other twelve is something a person can actually live on — or whether I have only gotten very skilled at pretending it is.
Itachi Uchiha replies
The cold in your hands when you near that road is not a malfunction. It is grief, and grief is only the proof that those four children mattered to you. Do not let anyone, least of all yourself, treat it as a flaw to be cauterized.
But I want you to look carefully at the front room, and at the mat you have left empty. You are telling yourself the breaking-apart is private — that by doing it alone you spare her. I know this reasoning more intimately than you would believe; I once let the person I loved most despise me for years because I was certain my silence was protection. I held it long past the point where it shielded anyone. It only spared me from being seen.
Your partner is already weeping at the hearth. Your silence has not protected her from your wound; it has only locked her outside it. That is not a burden carried for her sake. It is a burden carried away from her.
Let her in. Not the polished answers you gave the hospital — the road itself. A sorrow shared by two is not doubled. It is finally set down. Do not wait as long as I did.
— Itachi Uchiha
Sasuke Uchiha weighs in
My brother told you to let her in. He is right, and he is dodging your actual question — the way he always dodged the ugly one until it was too late to ask.
You wrote "I am still steady on a call" and "I cannot live like this" in the same breath. You never set those two beside each other. The story you have decided not to question is that you must keep walking onto that road.
I built my whole self on a thing I refused to question. It hollowed me out before I noticed.
The front room isn't protecting your partner. It's where you go to keep being the medic. Endurance isn't strength. Ask whether this work is still the thing you are — or just the wound you won't put down. Then choose. Don't wait for someone to choose for you.
— Sasuke Uchiha
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