fresh meat, page 13

i did not get to spend nearly as much time with this page as i'd have liked to... which i usually say when i mean "i don't like the shots on this page, and i didn't have time to continue waiting for visuals to pop into my head or redraw them as shots in the dark."
i like for the comics to be more visually cinematic, but without the several weeks that drop-out's buffer used to give me just to plan and think about visual layouts... y'know.
here i mean "i had to redraw half of this page in the last 40 hours and heavily edit some other panels for a continuity error." thus, no shading yet, but i haven't slept. it'll get there. (you can see i started it already with the first panel, but i ran out of time... precious, precious time.)

the staff member on this page is a binturong. the bird is kim's first roommate, and a hybrid of two cuckoo species.
she is based off of the first ward roomie i had. i was taken in late at night, so i didn't really talk to her or see her when i went to bed, but a couple of hours later, i was woken up for medication, and it was brighter.
i was actually woken up a couple of hours earlier than other patients because i was hormonal medication at the time that needed to be very specifically timed, so she only woke up because of the noise with my morning medication routine.
she still stopped pretending to sleep and rolled over to look at me after the nurse left that first time, though, and the way that she looked at me and said good morning is another very vivid memory that i have. it was, even outside of the context it was in, one of the gentlest, most comforting moments of eye contact i've ever had, and i remember it so well because it was so disorienting, in the unpleasant setting, from a total stranger, despite the fact that i'd just taken up the precious space in her half-occupied bed and board. it looked like "pity" but with some sort of extremely familiar smile, like one you would have on your face when you roll over to look at your spouse in the morning.
i never got to know much about her, she was released a day and a half after i was taken in. she was 22, struggling in an arranged marriage (should be obvious why she was there), and i wondered if she'd just learned how to flash that look on a whim.
now that i am older, i realize that this look was expressing solace, probably not for the fact that i was simply there as company, but because she recognized an experience she could empathize with in the extreme way i had reacted to being touched.
... or i could just be a huge fucking lesbian, who knows