at forty minutes past midnight, the white walls on a fight with darkness to shed some light inside the room. the forbidding scent of antiseptic hanging dryly on the air. the glow of the city's sodium streetlights tries to force itself past the glass panels, past the blinds.

what am i doing here?

if i were to write a story, places like these would be purgatories, cleansing filth out of not souls but flesh for living in this world. or i could call it a tollgate along the highway to an inevitable destination. and sometimes, it's a place where we purchase another lease in life.

so what am i doing here? i do not belong here, not just yet. and i should not be here for another completely different set of reasons. but i am. i wanted to be here.

and i also wanted a few more things. i want to break things apart into their most elemental components. i want to understand how they behave, how they alter other things - change their appearance, change their attitudes, change their constitutions. i want to build them up again, to carve out the right textures, the right temperaments. i want to engineer them to do the things i want them to, to do the things that my heart tells me to do.

i still haven't learned the magic touch. but i wish my being here despite the fact that i shouldn't would be enough to make you well.