Where My Life Stopped

The Island You Never Really Leave

Some places do not let you go.

You leave them with a suitcase, a plane ticket, and the certainty of youth —

yet years later, when the world has carved lines into your face

and your hands have held the weight of other people’s lives,

you realize you never truly left at all.

For me, that place is New Caledonia.

And the year is 1978 —

a date that has lived inside me longer than anything that came after.

This is the story of a life lived in full,

and of the invisible line that never moved from the island where it began.

The Departure That Split My Life in Two

I left my father, my mother, and my brother in 1978.

A simple sentence, but it holds the axis upon which my entire life has turned.

New Caledonia was my childhood geography —

the heat, the sea, the unhurried hours soaked in sunlight.

I had passed the written exam for the Naval Medical School in Nouméa,

and then traveled to France for the oral exam,

a boy stepping into the shape of the man he thought he needed to become.

When I was admitted, the path seemed straightforward:

medicine, discipline, service.

I remember the day I left:

no big goodbye, no tears, just a young man walking toward an airplane

under a sky too bright to look at directly.

Only later did I understand

that when the plane lifted off,

something essential did not follow.

It stayed behind — with my parents, my brother,

on that strip of burning concrete where childhood ended quietly.

Learning to Live in a Life That Didn’t Feel Like Mine

France demanded everything from me.

Medical school is not forgiving —

it absorbs you, reshapes you,

grinds you into the person it requires.

Then came my internship:

Martinique first, with its familiar sea breeze,

a geography that felt like a distant cousin of home.

Then Marseille,

a city of edges and fire,

where I learned endurance as much as medicine.

I married.

I became a father.

I built the architecture of adulthood —

responsibilities, night shifts, hopes, exhaustion, purpose.

And yet, beneath all that movement,

there was a place inside me where nothing moved at all.

A silent room where the calendar still read 1978.

The Desert, the War Zones, and the Weight of Other Lives

After my internship, I left for Mauritania for two years

as a treating physician.

The desert teaches you humility.

It strips life down to its essence.

There, medicine was not an academic exercise —

it was raw, immediate, often brutal.

When I returned, I chose anesthesiology and intensive care,

a discipline requiring absolute presence,

a steadiness I learned to cultivate even when I felt unsteady within myself.

I served in French military hospitals for years —

through crises, missions, sleepless nights,

moments where life and death hung by a thread

I was responsible for holding steady.

I took part in multiple overseas operations.

I was decorated several times.

I was awarded the Légion d’Honneur —

an honor I accepted with pride,

though a quiet part of me wondered if the boy on the tarmac in Nouméa

would have recognized the man receiving it.

In 2007, at age 47,

I completed my military career.

I continued working as an anesthesiologist,

first in the public sector, then the private.

I retired at 62, after decades of service,

with a résumé full enough to fill several lives.

And yet.

The Parallel Lives We Lead Without Knowing

There is a truth I have carried,

silent but persistent:

I lived a full life —

but a part of me never left New Caledonia.

This is not regret.

Nor nostalgia.

It is something quieter, deeper:

the feeling that the inner thread of my life

never entirely reattached after that departure.

That everything I built —

the studies, the missions, the family, the honors —

was real and meaningful,

but somehow running parallel

to the life I left behind.

Two lines, side by side,

never touching.

The visible life —

the doctor, the officer, the father.

And the invisible one —

standing forever in the island sun of 1978,

watching a plane disappear into the sky.

Writing as a Way of Returning

I think of the boy I was —

brave enough to leave,

too young to understand the cost.

Maybe writing this now,

after all the miles and all the years,

is a way of closing the distance between who I became

and who I left behind.

Or maybe it is simply the acknowledgment that in every life,

there is a place where time stops…

and another where we keep moving,

carrying the silence with us.