OCTOBER, 1991, SEATTLE, WA
THE BEGINNING
IT WAS AN amazing thing, that silly little concept of time.
No matter how much of it dragged on, hauling people and memories along with it, the past could stick with you, a painful reminder of what was. Yet, time also brought healing qualities, and growth too, two things that could do wonders for a broken person.
Lindy liked time, but she also loathed it.
She liked it because it separated her further from her past, guiding her away from the recollections she had once deemed too precious to forget. But she hated it too. She hated it because even with time, her life had remained stagnant and stale, never bringing anything new to the table that she could truly appreciate.
She was told that she had changed. Not in a bad way, either. Apparently, she had matured somehow, become more refined, more worldly. And next to that, even more beautiful, at least according to the way people looked at her.
The only difference Lindy saw in herself was that she no longer put up with any shit. Nonetheless, she was still the same kind-hearted person that she had strived to be in the shadow of her mother's memory, but she was also far more brisk than she had ever been. She'd laid her goals out in front of her and made them a priority. There would be, in her own words, no more time for anything else but her own success.
The summer that followed her breakup with Kurt marked the opening of an entirely new chapter in her life. Things flipped suddenly as if spun out of control and before Lindy knew it, she thought of herself less as a girl and more as a woman.
The first distinct, post-Kurt occurrence had been her first contact with Lee in three years. Her phone had rang and Lindy had unknowingly picked it up. When she had heard her father's greeting on the other line, she had slammed the phone back onto the wall so hard that it had fallen off, clattering to the floor.
How Lee had obtained her phone number, she did not know. She'd demanded from Trae if he had given it up but Trae had denied doing so, telling her that he himself had not seen or heard from Lee in months.
She didn't dwell on it. Like the rest of everything that had happened to her, she swept it under the rug, purchasing a new phone for the wall and changing its number so that Lee would not ever call again.
That same summer, Lindy crossed a threshold that she had never ventured close to before -- she had a one night stand.
Maybe it had been because she was still, deep down inside, torn apart over the loss of Kurt. Or maybe, it was because she had genuinely wanted a taste of the liberating feeling of taking a man home with no strings attached.
She had gone out with her old roommate, Jacqueline, to a local club. Lindy had never been to a nightclub in her life, albeit one that wasn't curated mainly for rock shows, but having been a newly turned twenty-one year old, she decided that getting drunk with a friend and dancing all night was only a rite of passage that she might as well have taken part in.
It was there that she had met a guy, taken him back to her apartment, the apartment she and Kurt had once laughed in, held each other in, loved in, and had sex with him.
