A Thread Breaking: Cheerless Again

10: Libby In The Middle

Look out, dear readers: we're going into fast-forward mode again!

There's not a whole lot to tell about the rest of February. Well, there are things to touch on, but nothing vastly important happened... nothing worth recounting in detail, anyway. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times - it was the freakiest of times, and I felt like a golden thread myself, that's for sure.

School and work went on just fine, blah blah blah. Let's face it - no matter how interesting the story about the lobster truck, the hurdy-gurdy and the missing Palm Pilot is, that stuff is unimportant in the grand scheme of things, so I feel I ought to sum it up with "blah blah blah" and move on.

Mom? She and her new family up and left, evidently - without so much as a goodbye to anyone. I asked Dad, but he said they never called again or anything. It's almost funny; I was tensed up and ready to meet my mother head on when she tried to de-lesbify me, and as it turned out she didn't even care enough to talk to me about it. Goes to show how badly she wanted to work things out, huh? Man, do I loathe her with a passion.

Who don't I loathe? Ophelia. When I told her the unabridged story, she mostly listened and understood without doling out a bunch of potentially useless advice. Y'know, yeah, it would've been great if she could snap her fingers and put all the pieces of my life back together, but sometimes it's nice to have somebody who's just there for you... and once we got past our close encounter of the lurid kind, it was almost like it had never happened. So much so that before I knew it, I actually had a girlfriend - scratch that, "friend-girl" - in the city; somebody to hang out with, talk girl talk. Hell, any female companion would have been nice, but this girl... only Sabrina has a bigger heart. Adymm was one hundred per cent wrong about her.

Speaking of which - no, I didn't patch things up with Adymm. That, perhaps, is the saddest part of all this; we didn't talk for over two weeks! It amazed me how much I missed not having him there to touch, and to touch me. Don't get me wrong, I tried to reach out - maybe not as hard as I could have, but there was so much crawling around inside my head, everything demanding equal attention. It's not like he made the effort, either! Besides, you'd think talking would be unavoidable, what with band practice, not to mention those three gigs we played... but he always seemed to magically have to do something, or be somewhere else, or talk to someone else. Anyone but me.

Unlike us, though, Ophelia and TQ patched things up well enough; TQ groveled, Ophelia melted, and everything was in its right place. In a way, I was the "other people" she wanted to see, and we saw plenty of each other on the subway. Despite being a painful reminder of my own failure, it was somewhat reassuring to live vicariously through their relationship; in fact, she actually came to one of our practices, though she didn't do much but hang around and watch him play (or stare off into space).

Little did I know, in the midst of all this, how much more I was going to have to go through in a few short weeks...

There's one conversation I feel compelled to write down here before we get to that, though - from early March. There wasn't anything else special about that day, but Ophelia said something to me that got things moving in the right direction again...

~ o ~

"God, Keanu is desirable with a capital 'hot'!"

Ophelia nodded sagely. "You speak the gospel truth, my friend."

"Would you look at that ass... God damn, I wish Adymm were here!"

It didn't take very long before she opened her mouth to say something; then she bit her lip, her eyes flicked back and forth, and she turned back to the TV.