two ways of being: the noun & the verb

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards. Crossed out. —Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed OutPotter is finishing up with his sketch of the craniofacial structure.There is still more of his body to go, and more sessions left, and Tom cannot be sure whether he wants the precise drawings to be more or less—true, at all, if he could even describe them as untruthful. They aren’t beautiful as Tom is in the mirror, but they are still, undeniably, him, with the eye of someone learning to cut people apart and look beneath their skin, still bloodless yet, and—well.The drawings have a certain quality, something that, perhaps, he’s reading too much into, having associated the sketching with the pose (and Tom, even if he'd never admit it, has always enjoyed being admired), and the look of green eyes flickering between paper and flesh: concentration, in some cases, is only another word for vehemence.

hey! so i did this despite still having exams ongoing. and this is fanfiction, and i am very VERY fallible, so please excuse the inaccuracies for, including but not limited to: medical school (a nonspecific location in an unidentified era); medical illustration (i am not a visual artist); Dorian Gray (i took the vibes, sort of, but do not expect anything like the exploration of hedonism, human nature etc. that Wilde or other fics have); possible misuse of random quotes.