I've spent my life remaking people — first rebuilding what illness took, then helping people become who they wanted to be. General surgery in Brooklyn, plastic surgery in Chicago, a microsurgery fellowship at Sloan Kettering restoring cancer patients from what disease had taken. Later my work turned toward aesthetic surgery, the face and the body — from reconstruction to reinvention. For a decade I also ran a gallery in Miami, in the early years when the scene was just finding itself.

But there's a part of my life I've kept mostly to myself.

My father was born in Havana and came to this country with nothing. He built himself into a surgeon — old-school, exacting, my role model. When I was accepted to Duke in 1977, I don't think I ever saw him prouder; to him, a son admitted to a college like that was the whole reason he'd crossed an ocean with empty hands. I followed him into medicine. He died while I was finishing my training in Chicago, before I ever reached Sloan Kettering — before he could see me finish becoming what he was.

Years later, in 2013, I lost my two closest friends, months apart. I don't have a tidy way to describe what that kind of loss does to a person. What I can tell you is that in 2014, I started writing — and I haven't stopped.

Twelve feature screenplays now. Science fiction, love stories, comedies, dramas. On the surface they're different. Underneath, I've come to see, they're the same: they're about the people who shape us, the ones we lose, and what of them survives in us. Inheritance. Memory that refuses to be erased. The versions of ourselves we fight to keep.

I've shared bits of this with the people closest to me, but I've never really put it out into the world. I'm sixty-seven now, and I've decided it's time to.

Bailesol Stories is the home for this work — original stories you can see before they're made into films.

— Leonard Tachmes, M.D.