Chapter 5

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I met my fiancé Michael, EX-fiancé I mean, when I was in my first year of law school. Just out of high school, I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, full of youthful optimism and my half-full glass runneth over. Michael and I met at a very pretentious play, which might as well have been written in Greek, because I wasn’t able to extrapolate a single syllable of sense out of it. The play had been written, directed and acted in by my ex-stepsister; my mother briefly married a theatre director when I was five. The marriage lasted only eight months, but I still remain friends with my stepsister Stormy-Rain. (The story goes that Stormy was literally born in the rain, I’m not sure how true this is, but I always loved to tell everyone that.)

People are surprised that Stormy and I are friends, because she is the complete antithesis of me; for starters, she wears a lot of knitted scarves and crushed velvet (even in summer), she lives hand-to-mouth as a theatre actress, director, astrologer and fire juggler. Personally, I think we were forced to bond during those terrible eight months, when our parents were either violently fighting, or drunk, high and partying.

But as much as I love Stormy -- and I really do -- I’d been dreading her play all week. I’d never enjoyed, or understood, any of them and the evening always ended with the inevitable… “So what did you think?” I reflected on some of the answers I’d lavished on her over the years, you see, I had had the foresight to kidnap one of my mother's theatre books 'Acting for Theatre: The Joy of the Fourth Wall' and used it as a reference. This had furnished me with the following answers:

“Mmmmm, wow, you really took that character off the paper and reassembled her with a *profound three dimensional depth.”

or

“Mmmmm, wow, I thought the use of kitchen sink staging techniques really highlighted the fullness of your character and her *profound complexities.”

*Note: I use the word ‘profound’ a lot, because it is the word du jour with the theatre ilk.

But as usual, Stormy’s play confounded me. She rolled around on the stage a lot and cried out for her mother. She bathed herself in a tub of green water and rolled around on the stage some more. But that night had also been very different because I’d been seated next to the most gorgeous man I’d ever seen.

Michael is good looking, no doubt about it. He’s tall, muscular and blond with blue eyes and an incredible smile, which was something I’d been looking forward to seeing when walking down the aisle. Although right now, I wished Michael looked more like a short, fat, hairy hobbit with Leprosy and a limp so he’d never be able to find another girlfriend again and would die a sad, lonely and pathetic death in a damp sewer somewhere.

But of course, he didn't look like any of those things.

The attraction between us had been instant and mutual, and we'd found ourselves stealing glances at each other throughout the play. During the second half, when he turned to me and whispered, “What the hell is going on?” I knew I wanted to get to know him better.

We went for coffee after the play and worked out that his brother was the graphic designer who’d made the poster for 'A Mother's Jealous Tears' -- obviously the reason for the green water -- and that he’d been given a free ticket and felt obliged to go. During our initial conversation, we established that he was an accountant (very professional), his family belonged to a Country Club (very respectable), he owned his own house (very upwardly mobile) and we enjoyed several of the same hobbies, TV shows, music and movies. We seemed to have the same ideals; he also wanted marriage and kids and dogs and a big house.

He was perfect. He ticked all my boxes. He crossed all my ‘T’s’ and dotted the ‘I’s’. It was even better when everyone said they liked him, my friends' and family’s approval had always been important to me, so when he’d started playing golf with my dad and my brothers, I knew I was in love.

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