there’s a body here

There’s a body here but, where am I?

Bathed in light beneath the sky

Sensation splashes across this skin

But where’s the space that I fit in?

Lying, sleeping, late at night

Dreams and memories become my sight

Places this brain has been before

Etched in lightning; fleetingly stored

Parts within me, they wither away

But a pattern persists in this spot that I stay

A wave of change, yet here I remain

The finite flux of a burning flame

Nothing to something then nothing once more

Emerged from the ocean onto this strange shore

There are trees and stones and stars way up high

There’s a body here but, where am I?

TJ Lee is a current second year medical student. He wrote this poem at the end of his first-year while thinking about how a sense of self or “I-ness” fits into his scientific, materialist world view.