The Then And Now of Despondency

Limbic Cadence: Red Plums

(It’s rare that I click so easily with someone but Tabitha’s bringing her around made our friendship blossom that much faster. I suppose it was her openness that drew me, her accepting and non-judgmental traits. Needless to say, we got along really well.)

My chef nose depicted her scent out of the gaggle of our friends and immediately I grew nervous. I’ll be the first to admit that underneath my serrated body armor, I’m a generally nervous creature. It only pops up with people I trust. Because the people you trust know the sweetest ways to destroy you. With my mild (see: extreme) trust issues, I find sharing anything exceedingly personal my way of loading a gun and giving it to you then trusting you not to fire on the bull’s-eye of my soul.

I’ve trusted a few, some guns got hot. So I trusted less, which gave some a full magazine. At one point, I trusted no one because I had eaten too much lead and my spirit was in physical therapy. So I became more selective, more thorough, thus my current state of affairs. I have a circle so tight that it’s like a second skin. I can hug my circle so tightly that its spine snaps.

With Ajax though, that would take a little more effort.

I’m grateful that we’re walking together instead of being held up in Greg’s place. Tabitha is hanging off Shawn’s arm, Ajax is trailing behind in the middle watching the scenery around us, Greg got a new girl he’s hitting on with us (didn’t care to remember her name) behind Ajax and I’m bringing up the rear. Normally, I’d be bouncing all over the place and being my normal, pain in the ass self as I spread joy and misery to my trusted buddies. Nerves has made me subdued, more introspective. Nerves has made me fidgety, it makes me wring my fingers in my pockets.

Nobody noticed, 99% of that being the couple and pseudo-couple have properly separated themselves to each other while still being in a group. I wonder if people actively notice that about couples. They pair off like life is a giant march to Noah’s ark (polyamorous and asexuals, I ain’t talking to you) and they just stay caught up in each other. And how dare you intrude on their private universe, you get either a dirty look or the most dumbfounded stare when you force them back to Earth. I think it’s pretty romantic, the idea of being two suns rotating in the same space. I also find it downright dangerous, to be so involved with another that nothing else exists for you, that reality becomes an echo to your consciousness, that sometimes you don’t realize you’re getting sucked into a black hole. There’s something so quietly lethal about it, the most romanticized form of love is suicide.

Couples make me uncomfortable, because I’ve seen the end result of rotating suns colliding in such a way that debris flies millions of miles and damages other universes. I’ve watched a sun die. I’ve watched an entire being collapse in on itself and bleed stars from every port. I’ve had the displeasurable honor of watching a star fall and I couldn’t catch it, it fell between my fingers (itrieditriedbutthenanditwastooslickitried), and it shattered into a fine star dust all over my memories.

Well anyway, we were going out to eat and Ajax held the door for everyone. Luck was on my side, too bad my nerves started to make me start cracking my knuckles. The pain of that was making me stable. I wonder if she’d be down for what I got in mind… I hope she doesn’t find it weird. “Hey, can I talk to you?” I say as I trail behind her as we go inside the restaurant. The food joint is wonderfully noisy, that means I can talk to her and not have our group know what I was planning.

She rolls her eyes up to me (I’m a pretty tall fella), giving me her full attention. I quickly learned that when she focused solely on you, she was listening but her attention was on a clock if you didn’t say something of interest.

“This is gonna sound strange so think about it first, okay?"

“What is it?” That was her warning statement that her attention was waning.

I cracked her my best trickster smile. “Something I bet you’d really like.”

She snickers, mirroring my smile. “Pffft. You really think so, huh?” Now I’ve got her good and interested, this could work out in my favor.

“Well, I was wondering if…”