The classroom was still.

  Only the sound of chalk gliding across the blackboard echoed in steady rhythm.

  No one spoke. No one needed to.

  Outside the window, a bird—impatient for spring—let out a single cry.

  The breeze nudged the curtain ever so slightly, as if that corner of the room belonged to a different season.

  I was sitting through a lecture at the medical school.

  Well—if we’re being honest—I was pretending to.

  My eyes were fixed far beyond the window, and the professor’s words no longer registered.

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  I thought becoming a doctor meant wearing a white coat, curing illnesses, and calling it a day.

  That was all there was to it. Always had been.

  Diagnose, treat, heal—protect life.

  That’s what a doctor does.

  "Those who live… must live for those who couldn't."

  Those words returned to me, carried on the memory of a scene.

  A hilltop plateau, wind sweeping gently across it.

  Blue flowers swaying in the silence.

  "So if there's still a chance to live… you can't give up."

  My grandmother’s savior was a foreign doctor.

  Her name was Dr. Mary.

  A woman who, in postwar Japan, dedicated her life to facing illness head-on.

  Far from her homeland, she remained a doctor to the very end—devoted to her patients.

  Ever since I heard her story, something in me changed.

  Just saving lives isn’t enough.

  I want to be the kind of doctor people entrust their lives to.

  That feeling—my first glimpse of what conviction meant—took root

  on that day, with my grandfather,

  on the hill where the flax bloomed.

  “…The flower’s meaning…?”

  “I’m grateful for your kindness.”

  And there, waiting quietly for me... was Dr. Mary.