this is about the afterlife of unlived lives

I once wanted to become a surgeon. I was thirteen, poor, and captivated, fascinated and totally hypnotized by the human body. Lungs, liver, pancreas: entire constellations flickering beneath skin, so mysterious and so precise. I didn’t want to save people as much as I wanted to understand them, cut through flesh not to harm, but to map the ghost that lived inside.

But that dream expired and not with the thunder you’d expect. There was no dramatic shattering. It just….. loosened. One day it lived in me and the next it didn’t.

I’ve forgotten nearly everything I ever learned or read about becoming a surgeon, maybe because forgetting feels safer than remembering I ever wanted it.

This is how it is about most dreams of most people. They don’t die loudly. They expire like unpaid domains. Quietly. Invisibly. Like how the body begins to reabsorb a tooth that no longer bites. There’s a word for this: ankylosis - when bone fuses with the tooth and the tooth forgets it was ever meant to move.

I think some people live their entire lives in ankylosis with their former selves.

We grieve the dramatic deaths. The loud ones. The things taken by illness, by war, by betrayal. But we don’t talk enough about the soft deaths. The ones we allow. The dreams we outgrow, or abandon, or misplace on a Tuesday afternoon between a delayed bus and a polite corporate failure.

If you study tree rings, you’ll find records of every drought, every trauma, every year it didn’t grow. We’re not so different.

In 1957, scientists studying frost rings discovered that even a single week of unexpected cold could permanently distort the growth of a tree. One week. That’s all it took to leave a scar visible seventy years later.

This kind of biological memory, non-verbal and involuntary, exists in humans too. In developmental psychology, the Still Face Experiment from 1975 showed that even brief emotional ruptures between an infant and the caregiver could leave lingering imprints on attachment patterns. Just a couple minutes of unresponsiveness could produce panic, withdrawal, confusion. It’s not just our bodies that remember. Our dreams, our expectations, our identities, they, too, are shaped by moments we often call insignificant.

I keep wondering, how many of us are still shaped by that one cold season?

I often find myself circling back to the human anatomy, to trees, to God, like these are the only languages I speak fluently and everything else is stuck in translation. Somewhere along the way, I stopped wanting to hold a scalpel. But I still write like I’m dissecting something.

My poems smell faintly of blood and bark. They mistake ribs for branches, lungs for leaves. They do not understand the difference between divine and anatomical. Most days, neither do I.

And yet, this half medical and half mythical vocabulary, has become my lens. I don’t write to resolve grief, I write only to frame it in a language I can survive.

There’s a passage in the Rigved where god Prajapati carves the universe out of himself, splitting open his own body to make the stars. I’ve always loved that image. That to create something meaningful, you must lose something intimate. Maybe that’s what happens when dreams expire. Maybe they don’t vanish. Maybe they become the raw material for whatever comes next.

We are not taught to treat expiration as transformation by our school and through medical degrees. We are taught to see it as failure and to forget that compost is not waste.

In this sense, I did not lose the dream of becoming a surgeon. I transfigured it. I conduct surgeries now with language. I explore inner worlds not through incisions and stitches, but through metaphors.

I didn’t become a surgeon.

But maybe I’m still studying anatomy.

Just a different kind.