The days race by and the nights flit calmly from view, simmering summer sweat and soft moans and scraped rollerblading knees, the sidewalk wins again but I've got the whole summer to earn iron thighs and long breath.
This week I've sped and drank and sung strange songs and hugged dear friends and planned new projects and plotted fierce, secret plots.
David thinks I'm going crazy, but if I can keep this up until next weekend he'll be crying all the way home from his surprise party.
Ah yes, operation super secret superspy, otherwise known as "Wood Shock" (he's welsh, that's his last name) and, uh, "boy are you guys going to a lot of effort over this" scheming is going divinely.
You'd think I loved the guy or sumpin', the way I've been stealing his palmpilot from his pockets, calling up his sister at the radio station while she was on air to get the phone number of his childhood friend so I could call her while at the same time handing kaff secret superspy letters and sending her on secret superspy missions while she tried out for David's band...
...and the guy she handed the note to, e-mailed me and gave me another name, and I called them and they gave me someone else's number and I think that as of today I've successfully spoken to every adult under the age of forty-five in the larger St-Hilaire region.
Wednesday evening I was starting to worry about not reaching enough of his friends, so I pulled the secret "I'm a chick I'm allowed to be irrational" card and somehow managed to mask the sour taste in my mouth while I pestered him to introduce me to his friends...
...turns out he really was worried how they'd handle meeting the pyschotic twenty-four-year-old that he's been screwing three times a night.
Funny, we got on splendidly, he took me to his home town way out in Otterburn for a play with the troupe that he used to perform with, and the ladies that I'd been leaving messages to were there, and we met and shook hands and giggled and they picked on me and razed me and told me stories of how every woman in the town was after my boy, and we laughed and planned plans of lesbian tantric sex cults until David wandered away from us with a cloudy daze floating across his eyes.
At which point Sherry spun around and announced that they'd gotten my message and that they'd pass on the info and Lawrence announced that her husband would be contacting me tomorrow and we whispered and giggled and outright cackled some more and put our silly girl faces back on when David wandered back past us.
I wonder if he would think it disturbing that I've spoken to his best childhood friends more often than he has this week.
The ride home was strange, strange conversation, my hands shaking with the vulnerabilities that I was voicing aloud.
And this morning I staggered in to work in time to saran wrap Athena's car under several layers of sandwich-wrap, share drinking stories with my new extreme-programming partner, and race off to get pissed on italian wine at some random steakery.
And right now I'm trying to figure out if I'll have the strength to go rollerblading tonight, or if I just want to go home and listen to Justin's plots and plans for world infamy and the domination of the gaming industry, or if I want to crawl into the bath and finish reading "The Story of O" so that I can swallow it and dream it and digest it before I see him again.
I began it yesterday, a plain book with a plain cover, covertly handed to me by Peter, courtesy of his girlfriend who thought I might like it.
Strange how I've never read it before and yet each word somehow reflects places I've been and wept in.
It's a story of submission, the story of a woman, O, who is being taught to sumbit, high and lost in a chateau, deprived of underwear and forced to allow any man to take her, at any moment of any day...
...let alone the whippings and beatings and lectures about her place, chaining her wrists to her neck so that she could not touch herself while she slept naked, and alone, forbidding her to look anyone in the eyes, forbidding her to speak.
I read thirty pages into it, my breath caught, I looked up, shaking my head in desperation to free myself from the clutches of the character development.
The phone rang, and it was my beloved, and I hesitated before answering him, wondering if I would get whipped for speaking.
I lost myself to thirty pages of the most encompassing writing that I have ever read.
The story of O isn't just a story, it breathes the way books have long since forgotten to.
And at the same time, the gleeful whooping of reality racing by is tearing at my hair and pulling my grin all the way to my cheekbones.
And I'm tired again. It must be Friday...
~