the daily differential
I feel so alone, I'd said to Foreman in the locker room as he stood there with that same damn accusatory look on his face. I'm tired. I'm going to go home.
It was like that game we played as kids: one person says three things and the other person has to guess which one of them isn't true. But Foreman didn't bother to make a guess, and if I'm being perfectly frank, I didn't really care what he thought. He'd seen enough already, and the last thing I wanted was sympathy from someone who never seemed to screw things up.
But anyway, if you couldn't guess, the last one was the lie--like hell I was going to go home and stew in my own angst for hours before crying myself to sleep. I already knew how that worked out, I'd told Spencer, and what came after that part, and how to be a textbook-perfect example of the Kübler-Ross model. Even if House's words were a pretty damn ironic self-fulfilling prophecy, I was going to make things better for now, one more time.
That's what I kept telling myself, anyway. One more time.
I already knew how this story was going to end: redemption or darkness, with my tragic young death. Better to go this way than to go like Mom had; either in a gutter or as a diagnostic genius, I could live with both, die with both.
So I was going to at least sleep well tonight, before I sat down in the morning to think. It was necessary, after all, it was prednisone for a painful existence. Prednisone named Alicia, with blond hair and lips like butter against my neck, who didn't tell me I was too thin and didn't want any favors. One more time, even if there was a little conscience not quite drowned out by the whiskey sours, somewhere in the back of my mind, that sounded like Dr. Gregory House. Even if I knew he was right, and that I couldn't be him for long. The rest of us couldn't half-live our lives.
After we were done, I pulled on a tanktop and my pants from that night before I crawled back into bed. Like hell she was going to take my wallet or my phone, but anything else didn't matter, as long as I could get some rest.
As it turns out, I slept harder than I thought.
The first thing I noticed was that Alicia was gone. The second was that my room smelled too familiar, like every hospital or medical office I'd ever been in in my life. The combined reek of industrial cleaner, pills, and bandages can't ever overcome the tinge of human anxiety, though, and it snapped me awake and into a mental checklist, terrified I'd ODed, had a bad trip, or that she'd done something to me--shit, how could I have been so fucking stupid?
But I was fine, except for the expected hangover. Nothing had been taken, I wasn't sick or drugged as far as I could tell, not that I was the best at this first thing in the morning. No one had stolen a kidney. Reaction time was normal, no pain and no numbness either. Everything was normal, except for the fact that I wasn't in my apartment.
I eased myself up onto my elbows and looked around me, lying on a made hospital bed in what looked like a clinic. Any hospital that wasn't in somewhere like Iraq would have taken personal belongings, got rid of my fucking sheet, and put a heart monitor on my arm and an IV into the other one. And if I was dead, I wouldn't have a goddamned hangover.
Slowly I sat up all the way, still holding onto the bedsheet with one hand. When I'd thought there were consequences to playing these games, ending up alone in a clinic with no clues to how I'd gotten there, like some kind of horror movie cliché, was not one of them.
“Hello? Nurse? Anybody?”
Then again, my father always said a whole lot of weird shit happened in New Jersey. Maybe for once he was right.
Spoilers only through 5x05, new threads up to Tuesday or ask me.
It was like that game we played as kids: one person says three things and the other person has to guess which one of them isn't true. But Foreman didn't bother to make a guess, and if I'm being perfectly frank, I didn't really care what he thought. He'd seen enough already, and the last thing I wanted was sympathy from someone who never seemed to screw things up.
But anyway, if you couldn't guess, the last one was the lie--like hell I was going to go home and stew in my own angst for hours before crying myself to sleep. I already knew how that worked out, I'd told Spencer, and what came after that part, and how to be a textbook-perfect example of the Kübler-Ross model. Even if House's words were a pretty damn ironic self-fulfilling prophecy, I was going to make things better for now, one more time.
That's what I kept telling myself, anyway. One more time.
I already knew how this story was going to end: redemption or darkness, with my tragic young death. Better to go this way than to go like Mom had; either in a gutter or as a diagnostic genius, I could live with both, die with both.
So I was going to at least sleep well tonight, before I sat down in the morning to think. It was necessary, after all, it was prednisone for a painful existence. Prednisone named Alicia, with blond hair and lips like butter against my neck, who didn't tell me I was too thin and didn't want any favors. One more time, even if there was a little conscience not quite drowned out by the whiskey sours, somewhere in the back of my mind, that sounded like Dr. Gregory House. Even if I knew he was right, and that I couldn't be him for long. The rest of us couldn't half-live our lives.
After we were done, I pulled on a tanktop and my pants from that night before I crawled back into bed. Like hell she was going to take my wallet or my phone, but anything else didn't matter, as long as I could get some rest.
As it turns out, I slept harder than I thought.
The first thing I noticed was that Alicia was gone. The second was that my room smelled too familiar, like every hospital or medical office I'd ever been in in my life. The combined reek of industrial cleaner, pills, and bandages can't ever overcome the tinge of human anxiety, though, and it snapped me awake and into a mental checklist, terrified I'd ODed, had a bad trip, or that she'd done something to me--shit, how could I have been so fucking stupid?
But I was fine, except for the expected hangover. Nothing had been taken, I wasn't sick or drugged as far as I could tell, not that I was the best at this first thing in the morning. No one had stolen a kidney. Reaction time was normal, no pain and no numbness either. Everything was normal, except for the fact that I wasn't in my apartment.
I eased myself up onto my elbows and looked around me, lying on a made hospital bed in what looked like a clinic. Any hospital that wasn't in somewhere like Iraq would have taken personal belongings, got rid of my fucking sheet, and put a heart monitor on my arm and an IV into the other one. And if I was dead, I wouldn't have a goddamned hangover.
Slowly I sat up all the way, still holding onto the bedsheet with one hand. When I'd thought there were consequences to playing these games, ending up alone in a clinic with no clues to how I'd gotten there, like some kind of horror movie cliché, was not one of them.
“Hello? Nurse? Anybody?”
Then again, my father always said a whole lot of weird shit happened in New Jersey. Maybe for once he was right.
Spoilers only through 5x05, new threads up to Tuesday or ask me.