“A first aid kit should be light,” Sarah’s mother always said, “so you can carry it anywhere.” Yet the emotional baggage inside Sarah’s metaphorical first aid kit grew heavier with each passing day of her nineteenth summer.
She sat in her dorm room, the actual first aid kit lying open on her desk – gauze, bandages, and antiseptic scattered across the surface like the fragments of her thoughts. Her roommate Emma lounged on the bed, scrolling mindlessly through her phone.
“Do you ever think about how we’re all just trying to patch ourselves up?” Sarah asked, more to the air than to Emma. “Like, we carry around these emotional first aid kits, stuffed with temporary solutions.”
Emma looked up, her eyes reflecting both confusion and curiosity. “That’s deep for a Tuesday afternoon. What’s really on your mind?”
Sarah picked up a roll of gauze, letting it dance between her fingers. “Remember Jake from the party last weekend?”
“The one you’ve been texting non-stop?”
“Yeah. He told me he has a girlfriend back home.” Sarah’s voice cracked slightly. “But I kept talking to him anyway. Kept flirting. Like I could just put a bandage over the fact that it was wrong.”
Emma sat up, her phone forgotten. “Sarah…”
“I know, I know. It’s totally self-inflicted. That’s the worst part – we create our own wounds, then scramble to treat them with whatever we’ve got in our emotional first aid kits. Band-aids of justification, antiseptic of denial.”
The setting sun cast long shadows across the room, painting everything in shades of amber and regret. Sarah continued to fidget with the medical supplies, arranging and rearranging them as if seeking order in chaos.
“Maybe that’s what growing up is,” she mused. “Learning which wounds need treatment and which ones we should have avoided in the first place.”
Emma moved to sit beside her friend. “You’re being too hard on yourself. We’re all fumbling through this thing called life.”
“But that’s just it, isn’t it? We’re given these years – this youth – and we’re supposed to figure it all out. Make mistakes, learn from them, become better people. But what if we just keep making the same mistakes? What if our first aid kits are just enabling us to keep hurting ourselves?”
The phone on Sarah’s desk buzzed – another message from Jake. She stared at it, the screen’s glow reflecting in her eyes.
“The real question,” Sarah said, closing the first aid kit with a decisive click, “is whether I’m brave enough to stop needing these bandages.”
Emma watched as her friend picked up the phone, typed briefly, then placed it face-down on the desk. “What did you do?”
“Told him goodbye. Some wounds need to heal on their own, without our constant interference.” Sarah smiled, a mix of sadness and relief washing over her face. “Maybe sometimes the lightest first aid kit is the one we choose not to carry at all.”
The room fell silent, save for the distant sounds of campus life floating through the window. In that moment, Sarah felt the weight of her metaphorical first aid kit lighten, if only slightly. She had learned, perhaps too late, that the best treatment for self-inflicted wounds was often the courage to stop inflicting them in the first place.