Hello all, Lo here. I’m going to paste half of this conversation now, and place the rest in on a later date. I was advised by the Rhetorical Gamer to make these posts somewhere between 500-1500 words long, and I think he’s absolutely right. I mean, who ISN’T daunted by a wall of text? Anyway, I’m afraid this portion is a little too slow, and while I feel it’s necessary, I might want to cut some things… But I’m not sure! I mean, would I think differently if I was reading it? My dear readers, your thoughts are always always always appreciated.
The phone rang and I threw my clock. Being a behemoth from childhood excursions to Zany Brainy, it crashed against the wall with the clacking of several now-defunct buttons and continued to tick merrily from a pile of towels. My heart was racing which made my head hurt. I actually felt like my brain was molten lava under a shallow shell of earth. I must have dozed off because Clerks I was pretending to be cutting edge on the television. Sighing heavily, I grabbed the phone, knowing I’d be disappointed.
“Hello?”
“Damn, Fro-Fro, you sound rougher than McJagger on a Binge.”
I sat up on my pillows. Aiden had not even arrived as a possibility in my mind.
“Dude. Three weeks and that’s the best you could come up with? I require top tier banter, sir.”
I could see Aiden’s smile in my mind’s eye, and I grinned back. He laughed.
“That’s not how we work, Fromance, I can tell the corniest joke after any length of time, free of charge.”
I knew this to be true, and was all at once so glad for it that tears welled in my eyes.
“Speaking of which,” I said affectionately, “How’s the future?”
I eased out of bed, groaning audibly, and shuffled out toward the kitchen. On other days, I’d put on the coffee, he’d do the same, and we’d sit down at our respective kitchen tables, knowing each other’s mannerisms well enough to play away the distance. He would read little snippets of this and that he was working on and catch me up on old friends and new news. I would do the same, telling him stories about people he had never met. People would come and go in our lives without the other ever meeting them, but the coffee and banter had changed very little. Today, however, I’d have to settle for tea.
I felt him shake his head dramatically.
“The future is bleak, Frobot.”
I laughed and only a dull ache throbbed in my head. I toddled down the four stairs separating (our) the master bedroom from the rest of the one-story round house Derek and I had so affectionately dubbed “The Coop.” The ludicrous little house had been painted a shade of palest pink with bombastic lime-green shutters by one of its previous owners. The living room and the foyer are at the front of the house and are separated by three feet of wall and a single stair. The front wall of the house is completely made of glass, except for the front door which is made of a heavy metal akin to the trailer doors I used to install with my Uncles as a summer job and painted the same lime green as the shutters.
“It’s perfect!” I had squealed, tugging at his hand with both of my own. He had stared at it, his face calmly incredulous. I spun him around so he was looking away from the house.
“No using your crazy mind powers. I feel like they would be wasted on simply changing the color of a house.”
“Freya,” he said, reaching out to let a long strand of my hair caress his fingertips, “You’re too excited. We haven’t seen the inside yet.”
But after seeing the inside, we were both convinced that this was the house for us. We ended up furnishing the living room so that nothing blocked the fantastic wall of glass that served as our bay window. This afternoon, the window was filled with the copper gold light of a late August afternoon, the edges framed with triumphant explosions of color. My roses were glistening with water (thank God, my neighbor Cynthia must have taken pity on me… or my flowers) their velvet petals glowing a deep, sweet pink. Irises mingled with azaleas, their splashes of purples and blues clashing wildly with the yellow forsythias and some orange and red plants I had never bothered to identify. The grass, sharp and short, glinted green under the fierce sky. The few times it had stormed since we have been here have completely made up for the fact that we basically live in a fishbowl. We once sat for a solid ninety minutes just watching the lightning chase and zip through the clouds from one end of the horizon to the next.
To the left of the stairs leading from the bedroom, straight from the feux foyer and behind a little red door, however, is where I found my sanctuary and the real reason I fell completely in love with the place and why I was willing to put a down payment on a ridiculously expensive house on the coast of Southern California. While Aiden began rattling off about something that happened at the University he worked at, I took a moment to look around my kitchen. The light in the room is gentle and always makes my unremarkable brown hair glimmer with soft, red-gold highlights. The chestnut cabinets are within my reach and filled with dishes we picked out ourselves. There is an island with a place to eat and sit, a section with cute electric stove tops, and a secret drawer to hide measuring cups and cutting boards of all sizes. There are little nooks to hide spices and corners to stock appliances, and a window framed by yellow cloth curtains over a scrubbed wooden table pushed against the wall. If you looked hard in the right spot through this window, above the eight foot security fence and through various vines and things, you could see the ocean.
Derek pointed this out to me on the first day as I was opening all of the drawers I could find. His hawk eyes glinted with longing when he saw the ocean, and I knew that the house had won him over.
Maybe I was wrong, I thought stonily. I was fiddling with the tea pot and listening to Aiden tell Charlie to take the dogs with him if he was walking down to the creek. Vaguely, I wondered why Charlie was there, but my recovering brain could really only concentrate on one thing at a time. I began playing the memory again, fishing around for other ones like it, trying to figure out which moments in our time together had been the ones that stacked up against me. How many times had I misinterpreted his annoyance as affection? How many times had I been too much of a “pain in the ass?” I heard him saying these words in my head a thousand times over. It was a phrase that had always made me giggle, and he usually kissed me afterwards. I placed a hand to my chest, feeling a real ache. I was such a fool.
“Rose? Hello? You still with us, private?”
“Aye Comrade,” I said wearily, bringing the hand from my chest to my head “In Russia, vodka drinks you.”
I felt as though I was cradled in a secret hideout. The smells of sun heat and past cooking soothed me with gentle morning thoughts. I sat down at the little wooden table where I had all of my morning chats. My mother and father still lived in Virginia, my sisters had moved to New York together. Gryfon and Sally had married and moved to Florida, and no one knew where Arist was at any given time. However, at this table in my little corner of the world, this table that a little splintered at some corners where the wood was fraying, they could appear as if we had never grown up and ran off trying to find the contentment we all seemed too scared to achieve. I ran a hand along its surface, and sighed deeply.
“I’m sorry, Aiden. It’s been a weird week and I’m hung over as shit. I got tea coming, though, so I’d love to hear all of the monologues you have about nothing in particular.”
“You made the cure yet?” He said, laughing. “I’m going to make it for Charlie once he’s done wandering around The Wood with the dogs. He’s in bad shape.”
My stomach gave an unpleasant clench.
“Ugh… I’m thinking about it… I guess that’s a start.”
)
