Would You Rather

49 - WYR: clean a cat or clean your act?

FINLEY

It takes wonders beyond my comprehension to get to a point at five at night where I need Fidan to come home.

It started with my complete and utter oversight a month ago. I've been taking the same birth control since I was 16 and, frankly, I knew it wasn't good for me that whole time. I haven't had a single period since then because skipping is just easier and less of a hassle. I get abnormally shit sleep, weird spats of weight-gain and extreme weight loss if I miss days, some migraines here and there, and a lot of stuff that points directly to hypertension. It might be school stress but it's probably not helped by this.

So I decided that I needed to switch it up and let my prescription run out while workshopping my other options. I wasn't planning on having any random sex due to swearing off hooking up with people, so that wasn't a risk. Currently I'm between an IUD and a different pill but I seem to have completely forgotten how extremely not-fun my periods were.

So I wake up to a blood stain on, of all people, Fidan actual Koskinen's spare sheets, a slight scramble to make sure I did actually pack for this, and then a very long time sitting on the bathroom floor waiting for the first round of ibuprofen to kick in.

So, as a benchmark, I'm miserable.

And then the labs get closed at noon due to the impending storm. So I have to drag my shit back to Fidan's microscopic apartment. And you know what? Fuck it, if he's going to be weird and randomly confess that he loves me then he can deal with me bringing home about fifty CT scan files and spreading them out on his kitchen table. At least I'm not dissecting anything.

After two hours of CT scan work, I check my email and my day gets even worse with a med-school rejection from University of Ottawa, which makes almost no sense considering the sheer amount of collaboration I've already done with ninety percent of their staff. So fuck them, I guess.

The next transgression is the blood not quite coming out of his sheets. Followed immediately by the cats discovering that you can climb curtains which they quickly knock off the walls.

Afterwards, and by afterwards, I mean after locking the cats in the bathroom, the only room without curtains, I have to walk a mile in the blistering cold to a convenience store to get more pads and ibuprofen because of course my stash from when I was sixteen is four deep and apparently Fidan doesn't keep up-to-date ibuprofen in his house. Or tylenol. Or advil. Or really anything. It was a miracle that I had two in a baggie like some sort of drug dealer in my school backpack.

I also decide to get, in a vague idea of an apology to Fidan, because he said he loves me and I've been nothing but a dick to him for no reason and I had a full walk to think about how all his snarkiness was a simple reaction to mine, a...

And I spend twenty minutes in the convenience store trying to figure out what you can get a man to apologize to him. Nat and I buy shitty wine whenever we need to have a chat because we both hate wine and we think it's funny. Which reminds me I must talk to her about other stuff and not just about what we're gonna do about the apartment.

I'm about to throw in the towel and get a four loko just because it's funny as hell when I spot a small black case that says Finnish Long Drink and, well, fuck it, right?

When I get back, my hair is frozen, the cats have gone wild in the bathroom, my ibuprofen is worn off, and I decide to try to make his mom's soup instead of even vaguely attempting to focus on my schoolwork.

Except that goes pretty expectedly terribly for me too because of-fucking-course it does. My second round of ibuprofen is not kicking in, so I'm halfway bent over with my head on the countertop, the onions are sort of burning, I'm getting a headache from hours of staring at CT scans, I rolled my ankle on the way back from the store, and I end up watching, mostly helplessly due to my hands being otherwise occupied, as Dino bats at the vegetable stock and dumps out half a glassful onto Brisket, who is behaving and staying on the floor.