Winter and Water

Two days ago, I was walking with Graydyl and S in San Francisco, on the way back to Graydyl's apartment after watching The Shape of Water in Japantown.

"Do you still blog?" Graydyl had asked. My brain short-circuited for a moment. When was the last time someone had mentioned its existence to me? In fact, I'd nearly forgotten about the blog myself.

So I don't really blog much these days, as one might surmise. In predictable narrative symmetry, I've returned to journaling in a notebook, not unlike the scores of diaries I filled up as a pre-teen. I write notes about the books I've read, the films I've watched, and other pieces of interest I've observed.

Winter is a breeding ground of nostalgia. When I return home to this valley, my past is inescapable. I've been devouring Guillermo del Toro interviews since watching The Shape of Water, and there was one quote that latched onto me. "The clarity of emotion when you're 16 is the most you you will ever be. But we look at you and see a fucking kid."

The night is falling. I sit at the desk in my childhood bedroom, by the north-facing window with the clearest view of our street. As the salt lights flicker on outside, I stumble across a shoddy video of Nuno Bettencourt at a Rihanna concert on Youtube. The keyboard and the electric guitar entwine their melodies in ascension, and here I am again, on the cusp of seventeen, dreaming of roses and rock stars and unsent love letters, reduced to the purest essence of my being: melancholy.

#

Unable to perceive the shape of you

I find you all around me

Your presence fills my eyes with your love

It humbles my heart

For you are everywhere

The Shape of Water was one of those movies that I kept turning over in my mind long after I left the theater, unfolding and refolding the creases to marvel at its construction.

It could have totally gone wrong in so many different ways. But the film walks so gracefully and effortlessly on that tight-rope, that you don't notice just how far the drop could go.

The linchpin of it all: the Asset. I can't tell you how many articles I've read on how they designed the sea monster. Undeniably a creature, with blue-black banding not unlike rainforest tree frogs and the spiny fins of a perch. And yet... not only an Amazonian god, but a plausible love interest for our mute heroine. The interviews will delineate the enormous amount of thought put into the large reflective eyes, the full lips of male supermodel, Greek nose of the "Michelangelo's David of amphibian men," but what struck me as I watching the movie in theaters was the physicality of the creature in movement as it revealed itself to Elisa for the first time.

Some people criticize The Shape of Water--as they often do for del Toro's oeuvre--for its simplistic story. I have never quite taken to that perspective. Fairy tales are by nature the distilled essence of centuries of storytelling, but you may be surprised just how difficult it can be to walk that tight-rope of sweet romanticism and grim realism with a final product that is too cloying or saccharine. (Aside: I haven't seen The Greatest Showman yet, and I may very well watch it solely to witness Zac Efron and Zendaya sing a duet on a trapeze, but I suspect the film falls short in delivering the right tone.) There is darkness in The Shape of Water, but ultimately it is a story where the light triumphs. And in an era where the world feels unsalvageable, in a time when my life is immersed in daily reminders of human mortality, could you blame me for being drawn to the light?

Lost Paradise

I don't remember when or how I first discovered Juliette Valduriez. That's the beauty of Youtube--wandering aimlessly click by click, video to video, until you stumble across something that catches your interest enough to cause you to hit replay. When I think of how I described the first time Charlotte sees Rhys with the guitar, I suppose it's the same way I felt about Juliette. Envy.

There were two videos that left a deep enough impression on me that I converted the videos to MP3 so I could listen to them on my iPod on my way to work. One was her cover of Sia's "Breathe Me," with an aching, soulful guitar solo that made the tiny hairs on my skin rise on end. The other was her original composition, an instrumental piece titled "Lost Paradise." Both of these made their way into my EP writing playlist and were significant inspiration for key scenes.

When I discovered Juliette, at that point she hadn't posted any new videos on her account in a while. I assumed she was done, but to my surprise, she came back last winter as Juliette Jade with a new album titled Terranium, which I ended up purchasing and downloading from bandcamp. Overall, I was fond of the atmosphere and style of her music, but while I have my favorite tracks on the album, those haven't yet gripped me the same way "Lost Paradise" or "Breathe Me" have.

Then, today she released "Lost Paradise" --- a full song, expanded from the solo she originally uploaded on Youtube years ago that I have probably listened to hundreds of times.

The beginning of the song is akin to her style on Terranium--subdued and melancholy, complementing her ethereal-ghostly vocal delivery. About three and a half minutes in, the guitar solo I have heard so many times suddenly enters like a thunderous cry. It is familiar and yet foreign all at once. It is like seeing a lost lover for the first time in decades, and you can trace that blueprint of the person you once knew but the stranger before you is older, matured, and full-fledged. An evolutionary incarnate that has survived to live a second life after the era of you.

coda

"I believed all of your dreams are duration.
You took my heart and my keys and my patience.
You took my heart off my sleeve a decoration."

-- "Work" by Rihanna ft. Drake

I think back to that last day, when I looked at her. Really looked at her. Barely lucid. Cachexic. She reminded me of a sleeping animal, limbs curled up in a ball to contain warmth. I wondered, if we could see the time we had remaining imprinted on our chests like the boxy red numbers of a digital clock, whether her time would show days, weeks, or perhaps even another month. An emergency room doctor once told us we would all learn to hone and rely our "Spidey Senses" in the way that she just knew by looking at someone whether they would crash on her in any minute. I knew the girl was dying, but still it came as a surprise when I pulled up her record on Monday morning and discovered she was already gone.

If you can look at a girl like her and see that she is on the brink of death... could you do the same with someone dying from within?

I barely knew him. I knew his name and his face, but I couldn't remember which classes we had shared or if we had ever spoken to each other. I only found out he had taken his own life because a girl I knew had written about her memories of him in high school, and the post had appeared on my newsfeed this morning. Beautiful and aching. A kaleidoscope, pieces shifting into new patterns and sides of a person I never truly knew. 

Sickness Sonata

Mvt. I

I always glance at my notes before I knock, but you never know what you will encounter when you open that door for the first time. Those clinical words won't tell you if her smile will warm you like a candle as you enter, or if she will barely spare you a glance as she writhes in pain.

She smiles cautiously when I greet her by name. Immediately, I notice two things: 1) her head is bald, as expected in the aftermath of chemotherapy, and 2) Wimbledon is playing on the television screen. I pull up a chair next to her bed and introduce myself. She tells me the story of her illness, but I can see the clues in the canvas laid out before me. The way she spits into a cup by her bed, unable to swallow her own saliva. The thin frailness of her arm as she reaches for the remote attached to her bed. After I finish my exam, I glance at the clock, and decide to ask her about tennis. She lights up when she talks about watching tennis and soccer. She's a huge fan of Nadal. She tells me about her childhood in Colombia, where she was teased for being "male" because she liked playing sports. I tell her about my own childhood as a competitive tournament player, training every day and missing out on school dances and birthday parties. We watch Azarenka serve an ace. When I stand up to leave, I promise to visit her again on Monday. Before I go, I help her open the window blinds. The room becomes soaked with morning light, and I wonder what is the Spanish word for sunflower.

Mvt. II

I ask her how she's feeling today. It's the same question I ask every patient, but there is a smidge of guilt when I realize I care about her answer on a more personal level, more so than the man I visited before her. She smiles but her shoulders are slumped. The scope on Friday came back normal. I saw it for myself on the screen that day, almost wishing there was an ulcer or something we could point to as the definitive cause of her pain. I tell her we're still waiting for the biopsy, but she tells me she is trying to accept that this may be the new normal. This inability to eat. This pain that roils her stomach. The bareness of her bones. She tried to force down the bites of too-salty chicken for dinner last night, but it all came right back up.

Today, she is rooting for the Spaniard, the 14th seed Muguruza, up against the number one seed, Kerber. It's a close match, 4-4 in the third set. I haven't followed professional tennis in years, so she tells me about the girl's tendency to succumb to nerves and choke on the big points. My mouth twists when I tell her I had the exact same problem. As the camera pans to Conchita Martinez in the stands, she mentions her sixteen-year-old son to me for the first time. She is worried about his health, too. She used to be overweight, until the cancer ravaged her body. She says a boy his age shouldn't already have elevated lipids. The clinician within me is automatically listing all the risks with childhood obesity, but I know this isn't the time. She tells me she tries so hard to force down those queasy bites of hospital food, because she wants to live long enough to see him graduate from high school.

Muguruza pulls ahead to a double match point. In that moment, we forget that we are a medical student and a patient in a hospital ward. Throwing up our hands, we groan when the Spaniard loses the next two points in quick succession. Deuce. We wonder if history will repeat itself, if Kerber will hold serve and Muguruza will fall to her pattern of slipping focus the closer she gets to victory. But instead of falling, she rises. Ad Out. Muguruza returns the serve with precision, and Kerber's shot sinks into the net. We erupt into whooping cheers and high-five each other as the Spaniard roars in victory. When I say goodbye, she smiles as she thanks me for taking care of her. She tells me she hopes I won't see her again. Because we both know that only bad things will cause our paths to cross once more.

Five days later, Garbine Muguruza defeats Venus Williams 7-5, 6-0 in an upset to win the Wimbledon championship.

Mvt. III

Sometimes the chart is an excavation, an expedition through layers and layers of time. I pull up the new consult's patient record and click through the pages in bewilderment until I realize she's been here since April. I trawl through the notes, trying to follow the medical narrative that reads like a downward spiral. Every procedure attempting to correct one problem has been followed by a litany of new problems.

When I visit her in the ICU, she is curled up in bed with her eyes closed. Her head is also bald and her body just as frail, but this girl is in her early 20's. When I gently ask the patient if I can examine her belly, her eyes barely flutter open as she lifts up the edge of her hospital gown. I observe the line of staples like a railroad track across her skin, the tube that goes straight to her stomach, the bandage around her surgical wound wet with blood.

My fellow and I both agree that the cause of her blood loss is from her surgical wounds, and we decide that there is no reason to put her through an upper GI scope when the cause is obvious. But the other teams are insistent. The surgeons say she's too high risk for them to operate on her again. They are fixated on the possibility of an ulcer, even going so far as to document a history of peptic ulcers that is readily refuted by the patient's mother. We finally agree to scope her on Friday, partly out of the desire to finally put this matter to rest.

Goosebumps raise across my skin when I see the inside of her stomach. Everything looks horribly wrong. The pool of bloodied gastric fluid is almost black. The lining of her stomach is covered with pale raised speckles, a trypophobe's nightmare. The camera swerves up to look at the tube that passes through her skin. A giant bulging blood clot hangs on the end, and as we attempt to pull it off, fresh blood trickles down the tube from the source: her surgical wound.

The atmosphere is grave when our team reconvenes in the call room after the case. One of the third-year medical students observes aloud, "That's the worst scope I've seen so far." The third-year fellow who assisted with the case has seen much worse in her 6 years of post-graduate training, but acknowledges the direness of the patient's condition.

"Poor thing," she says. "She's not going to make it out of this hospital alive."

car crash personalities

Okay, I HAD TO write this one down so I can remember this.

I binge-read Laini Taylor's blog from time to time, because I love reading about her writing process. I get the feeling that we have very similar processes, especially in the fact that we have very perfectionistic tendencies that get in the way of drafting. She's written before about how the process of discovering the right pieces of a story is akin to messing with a Rubik's cube over and over again until the perfect combination appears with a satisfying SNICK!

The past week, I've been working on a crucial piece in Rory's story that I've been avoiding for quuiiiite some time, precisely because I had no idea how to connect from Point X to Point Y. I finally had an epiphany after some intense soul-searching and had at least a semblance of a plan. It was intense enough that I marched my ass over to the undergraduate library after work to check out some books for RESEARCH. Namely, resources on gender in the rock and music industry at large.

Essentially, this past week I've been trying to write an "article" about Rory in a misogynistic perspective. I read up a lot on how female rock stars and female fans have been written about in music journalism, a predominantly male realm. It's been a patchwork process of weaving together a bunch of terrible, awful cliched things to say about a woman, particularly an unpredictable one. In particular, I borrowed some of the phrasing that's been used to describe Courtney Love like a road accident: "car crash personalities", "like watching someone climb from the wreckage of a car crash", "car crash timing." I started applying this idea to Rory, molding some sentences to reflect this.....

And then, when I scrolled up to edit the article's title: "Music Column: Rosecrans Royalty Car Crash Personalities and the Problem with Her Highness," that's when it suddenly jumped out at me. WHAT SICK IRONY, THIS IS PERFECT.

Collapse Into Now

Let me explain how I ended up here again.

I am a week and a half into my emergency medicine rotation, enjoying my day off after a 12-hour day shift. Time is a strange concept for me these days. Terrifying things loom over the horizon -- applications, personal statements, asking people for letters of recommendation. Things I know I shouldn't put off, and yet things I don't want to think about. And so, in these odd days when I don't have to go to the hospital... I write.

I write like a fever, because I can hear the clock ticking down. If I don't revise and polish up EP into a draft I can live with by next summer, two things will happen: 1) I will become busy as a hell once I enter residency, and 2) I may very well give up on this project altogether. Can you imagine trying to sustain enthusiasm for the same project for over ten years? This has become especially clear to me since finishing the first draft last winter. I have days when I am absolutely destroyed by self-doubt, when I think about all the ugly parts of the story that are still huge chunky slabs of blah that I still haven't polished down and refined, and when I think about the enormity of what I still have to do, all I want to do is just forget about this project altogether. The saving grace is that there are days when I read through that messy draft and reach those crucial scenes I'd dreamed about writing since I was sixteen, and I remember that this is the story I've wanted to write for nearly half my life.

But back to how I ended up here. I write with music playing in the background. The type of music varies wildly; I have been especially partial to the Wonder Woman soundtrack as of late. (Maybe one of these days, when I am procrastinating, I will write about the Wonder Woman movie or about the Badass One's rumored suicide attempt. Those are topics that have dwelled on my mind as of late.)

Today, I let my music player shuffle through my computer's entire MP3 collection at random. Talk about a stroll down memory lane. My MP3 collection encompasses a specific set of years in my life, ranging from middle school when MP3 players first became a thing, to my college years when people started moving towards music streaming via Spotify.

The song "Blue" by R.E.M. came on. I wrote a short story for class during college: a Bluebeard retelling that revolved around those lyrics. I looked up the lyrics and was struck by the beauty in its poetic sparseness. I realized how it's been a while since I looked up lyrics. I used to do it all the time, when I would snip verses and paste them into blog posts. I came back to this blog and specifically hit the "lyrics" tag. I read my post inspired by "The Ocean" by Mae and was stunned to realize I had completely forgotten about an incident during middle school that had me floating like a balloon. I read the lyrics to "W.A.Y.S." by Jhene Aiko and remember how I felt when I learned about a suicide by a medical student in the year below me.

It's been a while since I reread my old posts. I read Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur recently. The poems reminded me of my old blog posts, and at the time, I wondered if my old blog would embarrass me the way my old Xanga had. Surprisingly, not really. There are some clunky phrases here and there, but I am struck more by how well I can remember how I felt when I reread my words.

Truthfully, I don't think I will be blogging here more often this year, despite that this year will be similar to my gap year, when I had more free time as I applied to medical school. The goal for me is clear---to polish up EP to the point that I am ready to query before next summer. It's all on me now.