you're too young & eager to love

I started writing this as a gift. After revisiting it, I didn't like the direction it was going or much of the writing. I'm going to leave it alone and (hopefully) start something else. But I'm posting the beginning here anyway.

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There was something you knew once. Or perhaps only thought you knew. Fleeting, difficult to grasp. Most people gain knowledge with time, strengthen it with experience, but not you. You have only become more foolish, less sure.


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There’s a crush of bodies in a hot den. Music that is too gaudy while the gin you’ve been sipping is watered down, stale on your tongue. The younger hospital staff is celebrating someone’s birthday, thrilled that another thirty-six hour shift has come to an end. You were invited more out of kindness than belonging. The other attendings and residents flick their eyes suspiciously at you between refills of mixed drinks; stuck up princess, they think, the only reason she ever got a scalpel and an OR is because of her father’s checking account.

You know, and it makes you smirk behind your lipstick. The truth is that you are a pale imitation of yourself when you are not in surgery. That your absolute precision and control is talent and, therefore, not able to be purchased. It’s something to be envied (the only thing about you worth envying.)

Drugs slow you down long enough to breathe, giving you merciful patches of black clarity in your memory. So you slip away into the restroom, still holding your gin, and swallow a pill behind closed doors. You mostly taste juniper. It’s quick acting though and your vision turns hazy at the edges. Leaving your glass on a counter, you push your way into the swarm of bodies, letting the music seep into your body and accelerate your heartbeat, your adrenal glands. This is your favorite kind of dancing, a wild animal story told with limbs and sweat. You sing nonsense words over the drums and scatter laughter like applause.

It’s true when they say that people dance the way they fuck. Your thighs shake a little from the tension in your legs, balancing and moving on high heels that turn you taut. You wear your hair down and it presses against your hot neck. You breathe unevenly. Drey notices all of this from her position at the bar, her fingers still on the wrist of the woman at her side. Her eyes are dark and the lights make her look sly when she’s still recovering from the sight of you. It is always a bullet-strike to her stomach whenever she encounters you outside of her apartment, when she is forced to remember how much of a stranger you really are.