GENERAL.
full name: maxine hirsch
age: thirty-nine
gender: cis woman
sexuality: raging bisexual
pronouns: she/her
residential area: downtown vancouver
occupation: cardiovascular surgeon
two positive traits: hardworking, intuitive
two negative traits: blunt, pedantic
length of time in vancouver: 28 years
faceclaim: sophia bush
QUOTE.
“ i don’t have to forgive to heal. this anger has healed me in more ways than forgiving a person ever could. ”
BIOGRAPHY.
tw: mentions of academic pressure, neglectful parents
her parents never legally married, and so they never attempted the traditional farce of staying together. if maxine thought about it, they hardly suffered one another’s company in the first place. the reason they kept her for was—well, no one really knows exactly why. she was never bold enough, or maybe cruel enough to demand an answer. perhaps they felt they wanted a child because it was the last bastion to cross, the last fence in the orchard of adulthood. the final magnet on the fridge of accomplished people. maybe they had simply seen a challenge, as it was so often their style, and launched headlong into it. they would approach child-rearing with the precision of mass reviews, as journalists do with great disasters, until it had the featherweight touch of a quantitative analysis: a rulebook to be followed to the letter.
they did all they were supposed to, adjusted maxine according to this litmus test. doctor visits, stellar extracurricular programs, language exchanges & debate clubs overseeing genovese lakes. they provided the bare essentials for this aluminum blueprint; anything superfluous, of course, would skew the results. maxine was the experiment they invested in, a uniform whole, rather than a sum of parts. if you judge it by any other name, the trial was a success. she had become the best version she could’ve ever been, all things considered. what if it was hollow, as all polished shells are? it was light enough to float. given the haphazard turns of her mind, the way it led itself to a fool’s gold chase that could’ve ruined her long ago—yes, given all these fatal flaws, her parents tempered as much as they could.
it was a twisted environment to live in, both the scion’s and the scholar’s; a microcosm of academic renown, foreign dignitaries, elizabethan plays instead of bedtime prayers. wealth, of course, and diplomacy went hand in hand, their fingers threaded together like the tails of small monsters. it was a world illuminated, but sterile—incandescent for all the wrong reasons. to her parents, everything remote required undiverted attention, even as it took place on the other side of the world; everything human grew tepid within seconds. the child learned to speak two, then three languages, and moved deftly between their unspoken rules—even as the deeper meaning eluded her. growing up, she would spend half the year in vancouver, where her mother had settled, and half in whatever place her father had a scholarship in. at times, a few months would get swapped in the schedule like tactical retreats—when a conference or a lawsuit came up, those unmissable, unmitigable things, maxine would suddenly find herself with more time to spend with one parent, and very little left to say. she never protested ; she learned this, early on, how to shape discontent into purpose, how to bevel disadvantage into a three-card trick.
she never protested most things—to her, feelings were best tasted in dreams, and even then they had to wear the face of others. she exuded a strange, stoical calm. there was authority, but there was also an ominous fire. as if she saw what might happen, and steeled herself throughout it all, even as her mind shied & sheathed back into itself. it was this air that got her through most of the situations where she had something to prove; that made up for her real, mercurial nature, which no one could even begin to guess at. it was this which acted as ransom, as guarantee, and bid others to follow her. an air of bravery which surpassed girlhood, and of wisdom which surpassed even will. above all, she learned to spin the narrative so that she was always turning. summers spent country clubbing in cambridge are long gone. the following years are spent in residency at john hopkins, and yet, she never managed to stray too far from home. with a newfound opening for the position, vancouver called max home like a siren song and she’s served as one of the lead cardiovascular surgeons since.
WANTED CONNECTIONS.
ex-fiance / flings / exes / coworkers / best friends / drinking buddies / acquaintances / people that genuinely can’t stand her lmao / occupational rivals / past academic rivals















