The Second Dissection
by Michael Colbert
1.) First incision
The first cut was mine to make. Somehow, Sneha and I always seemed to be in science class together, and in seventh grade that meant we were lab partners for frog dissection. Once I made the initial incision, the scalpel was hers.
2.) Elongate incision
The other day, she texted me that she was inside a patient’s body cavity for several hours. Sneha is now months into her intern year as a surgery resident at a hospital in New York, chancing COVID exposure since day one. It’s a far cry from that day with our frog.
3.) Separate skin from muscle
We’ve known each other fifteen years, though on dissection day we were only a year in. Sneha had started in our school in sixth grade, and we were assigned seats together on her first day. We started talking in line for the bus and soon were calling each other to review homework and chat at night. We lived in the suburbs of Worcester, so high school hangouts were time wasted in someone’s basement. Freshman year, we spent an entire Sunday facing off a cell project for our biology class. We surfaced for air, walking aimlessly around her neighborhood and made brownies with her friend who lived down the street. After freshman year, we split into different science classes.
In public schools, we spent all our time with the same people until we didn’t. Senior year, with two other friends,we’d drive laps around the rotary at night, get Wendy’s or diner food before curfew, imminent departures mentioned sometimes, somewhere along the way.
4.) Pin the skin
Sneha went to school in New York City, and my family moved away. For years, we did what high school friends do: text on birthdays, text hey what’s new, text I’m in town, you around? We’d see each other once or twice a year, driving the hour from one house to the other. Together in our hometown, we’d visit the same places — same field, same house of pizza, same café — but without joyride laps around the rotary. We’d talk awhile, say goodbye once we’d caught up on everything.
5.) Muscular incisions
In New York for work on my twenty-fourth birthday, I texted. She toured me around her med school building, where friends studied for board exams, asking her friends, future doctors, how it was going. If this were ten years earlier, we would’ve been talking about American history in the hallway before our weekly Friday test. At a speakeasy, we drank twenty-five dollar ice cream cocktails, said goodbye again for now, said keep in touch, we’ll talk soon, this time for real.
6.) Cut chest bones
This March, she graduated. We overlapped for two weeks in New England and this time dissected the juicy stuff. Wearing masks, walking by the water, we talked love, politics, the things we never had time for when we were only catching up. Her time in New York now stretches towards ten years, during which I’ve also moved around, changed jobs, come out, and gone back to school. I wonder how we put friends in time capsules. We’ve known the other has been going through the world independently since we left for college years ago, yet we’ve never had enough time to actually interrogate what that means. Escaping to the other during quarantine reminded me of what it’s like being a friend versus just having one. We get to spend time together again. We get to hang out.
7.) Separate muscles, organs
Now, she’s back in New York, in her intern year. Our texts hiccup across the gaps of her twenty-six hour shifts. With big ideas about her residency, about how to raise awareness of structural problems in medicine, she’s begun writing. We send each other essays, and she sends selfies in COVID gear. I pinch my fingers on the screen to zoom in.
8.) And now observe
I don’t remember what happened to our frog. A sucker for nostalgia, I hold onto that first day of school, the laps around the rotary and hours working on a biology project at her dining room table. Our last day together before her return to New York, we drove around town; I had errands to run, favorite foods to pick up for my family while I was in town. We said goodbye in the park where we’d take our catch-up walks. Though we couldn’t hug goodbye, together we’d already cut deeper.
