Every 12^th day of May each year since it happened, I lose more of myself, or my mind, whichever term is more correct because I mostly only exist in my mind now.

The real world is just an echo of the past I once belonged to when I was still someone and was clinically sane. Not that I am insane now. I find it absurd and the me then would have agreed. This isn’t crazy. This is me coping. I’m just not all in my head most of the time. I’m mostly revisiting the past, and her, and how things could have ended differently.

I don’t have any regrets and I don’t think she has any either. But I miss her. And the emptiness doesn’t get easier each year; it just gets longer. If a mathematical equation could be used to explain what I feel then imagine the emptiness and missing her to diminish in half-life each year. You’d be duped to think it gets smaller and smaller by half and that’s better but actually it lasts longer by infinite halves.

In my head, I go back to 10 years when we first met.

I was Dr. Kwon Jiyong, a resident in Psychiatry at a private hospital. I studied Medicine from a distinguished school, graduated at the upper 10^th percentile of my class and passed the board exams on my first try.

Others tease me for taking up Psychiatry saying it was a soft course, nothing really medical about it all just talk and drugs. That it wasn’t as concrete and solid as Internal medicine or Surgery but full of the abstract, crazy and unpredictable.

But maybe that was what attracted me to it. The study of the mind seemed like a good way to study life itself.

In my first year, I was tasked to do daily rounds of patients, noting their activities and mood for the day. If they were showing signs of improvement or were falling deeper into their neuroses. Since I was new, I was mostly assigned to the easy cases- delusions, eating disorders, bipolars, substance abuse, schizophrenics. As we gain experience and knowledge, we get to handle more difficult cases -  depressive disorders with suicidal tendencies, schizophrenics with violent streaks, multiple personality disorders, ual disorders and the other high profile cases.

In my second year of residency, after a particularly harrowing conversation with a teenage boy who claims his thoughts and actions were broadcasted in the internet, (which seems oddly synonymous to every social networking site to me except they weren’t directly transmitted from his brain nor do they include dirty conversations with a guy named Phil), I went to the walled garden outside the building, and sat on a bench under the shade of a tree.

I was feeling sorry for the teenage boy, how he was losing his mind at a young age and how he would depend on drugs for most of his life, when I heard someone speak.

“I love the sun.” she said, her voice melodious.

I turned to my left and saw a frail looking girl in a white dress with hair falling past her shoulders standing under a stream of sunlight. She was pale and thin but still it did not deduct from the fact that she was still the prettiest girl I’ve seen. I could only imagine how she must have looked more beautiful before. Before what I wonder? She had dark circles under her eyes with hollowed out cheeks and the body of someone who was clearly underweight.

I had the impression that she must be another patient with an eating disorder, when I saw my senior resident arriving with the owner of the hospital. She went to them and they left together.

It was then that I remembered the whispers of the hospital staff about the hospital being built for the daughter of the owner.