The Hate Potion

05 | the star

F I V E

T H E   S T A R

upright: hope, faith, purpose, renewal, spirituality | reversed: lack of faith, despair, self-trust, disconnection

ϟ

AS UNPREPARED AS I was, the end of the week came like a bullet, speeding and ripping through everything in its path.

My plane ticket and hotel reservations for the weekend in Los Angeles: booked on a whim, leaving me to deal with surge pricing and the last available seat that was rows away from Lyra. Thankfully, we were rooming together because she had the foresight to book us a double room the day we got all of the information. Maybe she really did have a third eye up there.

My newfound bevy of high profile clients I inherited from Parker: seemingly satisfied with the transition as I spent countless hours flipping through Parker's Rolodex and making phone calls assuring them that I was just as capable of taking care of their needs as he was. Of course, I wasn't sure if that were actually the case, but my resume seemed impressive enough.

My friendship with Parker: did not seem to move in the same breakneck speed as everything else in my life. Instead time seemed to move through it, bringing on the moments where we would last see each other a lot more quickly than I wanted. We had attended a few preliminary company meetings together where Charles begged all of us not to embarrass him and our branch in front of his ex-wife, and there were moments in those meetings where we would meet eyes that felt so electrifying and intense that it almost hurt. Then again, he was about to be whisked off to another state taking all of my dreams with him, so it actually did hurt.

And the love potion that Lyra was concocting: she was somehow able to sneak it past the intimidating TSA agent who checked us, so that plan was still in motion. It was contained in a tiny vial of shimmery, purple liquid that currently sat in her carry-on bag overhead. She told me she had spent the week brewing it at home using her grandmother's books and the last ingredient she needed was a strand of Parker and I's hair. My relationship with him hadn't progressed into the consuming-each-others-hair-in-food stage just yet, so I wasn't sure how I was going to pull it off. However we were too close at this point for me to just cut my losses now — I needed to follow through.

And just how far was I? About thirty-five thousand miles in the sky above Carson City. We were a little more than halfway through the two hour flight to Los Angeles, which wasn't a lot of time under normal circumstances. My bus ride with Lyra was about thirty minutes depending on traffic and that always felt like a breeze either way. However, Lyra was a lot closer to the front of the plane and sitting in a window seat next to one of the nice ladies from Human Resources. Meanwhile, I was sandwiched between two of the self-proclaimed 'Office Bros' in my own personal hell.

The Office Bros consisted of three men who I typically avoided: Andrew McCauley, Trevor Golden, and Devin Haynes. They weren't particularly awful; your typical guys who graduated but their personalities were still in their sophomore year of college. If one were to examine a cross-section of their brains, they'd find the words "brewski" and "broski" etched into every fold with permanent marker. They were generally loud during the workday as they boasted in the lobby about their weekends full of debauchery with sunglasses over their still-adjusting eyes. I couldn't be too mad at them, though. When they threw the office bar crawl last year, it was so good that a couple of our coworkers somehow ended up in the next city over with no memories of the day before — the boys really knew how to party.