The Mistress

 I've started keeping a physical journal, which I occasionally write in. But sometimes it just seems to make more sense to write things out on here. There's history here.

This last academic year was an emotionally difficult one for me. In addition to work stressors and family matters, this past year was when I felt deep in my bones that I was giving up on EP. There's a particular grief I can't quite explain. Maybe it's like falling out of love. Imagine your life's blood, sparking fire and light for the past decade, and then one morning, you prod at the unrecognizable mass and realize it's turned cold and stale. This was a project I had become so intertwined with, and I already knew instinctually that it was starting to go south. Whenever I was editing and revising, I kept imaging a tiered cake that had been overbaked, with frosting dripping down messily and the base of the cake hacked away into an unstable foundation.

I'd already heard the advice from other writers, from my own mother, from my own friends, that I should work on something else. Move on. It took me months to get to that level of acceptance. Even then, there was nothing that gripped me in quite the same way, that made me want to sit down and spend hours poking through words, when it was so much easier to be binge-watching Netflix.

I finally found the spark I was looking for during the last week of October.

I've known for a long time that I want to write about my experiences in residency. I'd already tried drafting pieces during the course of the past two years. Something felt off, though. I couldn't quite get the tone right. My initial idea was to go after a David-Sedaris-esque tone, but it seemed almost too flippant for the subject matter.

There usually isn't some magical aura preceding the moment when inspiration strikes. In this case, it just came upon me of all sudden, and I was aware of it enough that I could seize onto the idea before it flitted away.

I'm working on a new story. It's still untitled. It takes place at the hospital I train at, in the exact same period of my training. It's essentially an alternate universe, in that I am creating completely new characters from scratch and trying to avoid anyone that exists here in real life. It's a rom-com, a love story that comes to head in the time of Coronavirus. Except everyone has already used that corny "Love in the Time of Corona" spiel so I'm trying to avoid all that shit. My aim is to make it as specific as possible about the experience at this hospital, to reveal almost journalistically the realities of working in a charity hospital. But at the core, I want to write something fluffy.

There was something about EP that felt epic in scope. To this day, when the guitar solo in the live Chicago performance of "Edge of Seventeen" or the crooning in Jaybeatz's remix "Lay Down" plays on my earphones, I am instantly transported to the cinematic moments I wrote that these songs inspired. I don't feel the same way about this Untitled Med Rom-Com. But there's something low-pressure about this new project that has been a pleasant change. I've been forcing myself to write as quickly as I can, to get the garbage down on paper.  There's also something different about writing a romance. Your story lives and dies by your leads. It's like meeting someone new, fleshing out their personalities and relationships, and then trying to throw them together into situations and waiting to see how you can make things sublimate.

Things are still early. I might lose interest. But hopefully in the near future, I will introduce you to Rigo and Elise.