This masquerade is getting older

I think it's time to bow out as Adam's woman.

Darkside, my romantic love for him, kept things stable. I'm cut adrift, romantically, and as much as R. is a good friend and a fun lover, he's not a stable mooring to set a relationship against. I feel that Adam is entirely miscomprehending the nature of my relationship to R. R. is a good friend to me, and we play around sexually a lot and laugh about it, but the emotional age difference is too staggeringly vast to make it anything more than play-love, and perhaps not even that. Oddly enough, I can go to sleep leaned against R. on the couch, but cannot go to sleep in the same bed with him.

Adam and I will have to reorganize our relationship with each other based on Darkside's not being a totally key factor in my life anymore. I'm romantically ungrounded, with a highly charged thing with Adam going on. Are we nuts? Well, yes, if we keep this up. Burnout.

We'll have to see.

Victims of Leftover Roadkill

Attempting to clear off the spare bed in my room for marxdarx because Votania and Nephew are sprawled out all over her bed in such a way that Marx has no real room to sleep in there. So he and I commenced to clearing off the spare bed in my room.

Well, right in the middle of that, Adam came busting into the room rather fast with cheeks bulged out in the classic fashion. Apparently he had been unkind to his digestive system yesterday, and today attempted to help clean out the refrigerator by eating some of Votania's three-cheese pasta salad.

Don't get me wrong here. The three-cheese pasta salad is delightful stuff, absolutely wonderful, and I could eat it happily every two weeks or so. Unfortunately, this particular instance of the cheesy creamy pasta delight was not, after the evening it was made for dinner for, stored properly in Tupperware in the fridge, but instead stuck whole-bowl into the fridge without so much as a plastic wrap cover on top.

Adam is now suffering, and blowing chunks off and on. Poor guy. Marx is now happily settled into the spare bed, well on his way to being out cold. I have unearthed some spare notebook paper, which is a bonus, since I will be needing this for classes. Strike an item off my shopping list. Adam's sitting in the living room with the computer and a trash can near to hand in case he doesn't make it to the bathroom. Poor Adam.

Perhaps the Human Garbage Disposal will learn his lesson?

Twerpair

Learning to speak Joanie is almost a college level course. I was not raised with mainstream America. I did not have any My Little Ponies. No TV. No pop music until I was 15.

I had a sister, though, Narcissa (biosis), and together we spoke almost our own language. Not so much new words and grammar (although there were a few of those) but the history, the vast density of stories and legends and truisms behind the words, as much as readers of the same body of literature can make literary allusions with a few casual words and speak volumes to those who have read the same books and know them well.

We also had chickens, and it was from them I learned what happens to those who are "different" -- how murderously vicious a pecking order can be -- and also what true loyalty is -- when someone has made your sister squawk, you leap up and hang onto the offender with your beak and your claws, screaming bloody murder the whole time, never mind that the offender is easily a hundred times your size (two pound chicken, 250 pound adult human). From them also, I learned the strength of the twerpair.

Twerpair, the name, evolved from the breed of chicken Belgian Antwerp Quail. Cute little banties with fuzzyfeathered faces, looking more Dr. Seuss than something that should be running around the yard scratching and occasionally laying dainty little eggs. We called them Twerps. We had two of them, sisters, almost identical. They were raised by themselves together before we let them loose with the other chickens, so they stuck together from day one. Their brooder, a giant grey fluff named Chickabird, went with the rest of the brood over to a friend's birdyard, so our twerps were on their own, with just each other for company until they met the rest of the chickens. In retrospect, I see how that paralleled my sister's and my development, with little to no contact with other children our same age until we reached school age, and then, very little socializing outside of school.... but the Twerps had evolved a strong bond of sisterhood. Where one went, the other went. When one felt lousy, the other one stuck by her side. Where one roosted, her sister did too.

Narcissa and I called the phenomenon, and the birdies, a twerpair, a pair of twerps. The word came to be applied to any close, loyal friendship of the form "where one is, so is the other."

Twerpairs don't long stay apart from each other in death. When a dog carried off Swallowtail, the rounder of the two, it was only a few months before Nutty Brownie, the smaller and darker-marked twerp, was found drowned in the washtub that the geese swam in. My mother's theory was that Nutty had perched on the edge to get a drink and had fallen in, and had been too weak to flap out, citing Nutty's recent ill health and general shakiness. I'm not so sure about that myself.

You can practically read each other's minds in a twerpair. There is much harmony, and it comes relatively naturally: it's not a stress to avoid offending/pissing off/upsetting the other. Born on the same day, to the same foster mother, to the same environment. Thinking the same. Feeling the same. To a degree, looking the same.

Hey, jdllama, you were in my dream...

It sounded like the perfect setup for a witchy detective novel: the esteemed Japanese business family is in deep magical trouble, and they don't know how to get out. Fortunately, their son, jdllama, has made friends with a witch: a girl named Azz, through school. Working together, they just might be able to save the family, the business, and possibly the world...

But, as only the witch and JD knew, it went a little deeper than that. Just before all the trouble was about to explode, Azz and her friend and colleague Darkside had been discussing the situation, and also Azz's roommate/sister Votania, standing in the chilly winter wind by the side of the lake.

Darkside started telling Azz everything he knew about the situation, absolutely everything. Azz soaked it in; Darkside's briefings were always thorough. But a nagging feeling bothered her. Darkside was telling her things that she would ordinarily never have been told, things that he would keep track of, things she could always ask him. But he told her them now as if he expected her to remember them because she'd need them later.

Somehow, Votania got into the discussion. Darkside still cared deeply for Votania, that was clear, and while they had been dating, learned much about her. Darkside gave Azz a quick but head-spinning analysis of how Votania was likely to be drawn into the web of lies the creatures (if they were creatures; spirits?) had woven, and an even odder rundown on the care and feeding of Votania for the rest of her life, all her weak points that Azz would have to be careful of; her secret desires.

As Azz noted each point, Darkside's attitude became more and more unreadable. As Azz walked off, she suddenly stopped and watched in horror, but not surprise, as the tree limb Darkside was clinging to cracked, and fell, dropping him slowly into the lake, him still clinging tightly to the tree as he submerged. She did not go to fish him out, could not. She knew that this was his Intent, and even in his self-destruction, she could not deny him his Will.

The grieving Azz helped jdllama with the investigation of the supernatural crimes and interference surrounding his family and their business, and were putting a near-close on the case. All Azz had to do was come and take one last conference with JD before performing a heavy exorcism, and all would be done.

Each time Azz passed by the lake, she looked down into it. She could see the tree branches sticking out from the water, and if the pondweed swirled aside to let her see, she could see Darkside's cold and pale face, somehow magically preserved. She broke a twig from the tree. It seemed unfair that the twig, and the rest of the severed tree limb, were sprouting leaves now, while Darkside lay dead in the embrace of the pond. As always, she blew him a kiss as she continued to scheme with JD over her cellphone. She could stop and gaze at the lake for a few minutes...

Darkside's eyes opened, just then, his lips curved underwater into his characteristic smirk, and he winked at her! Azz was thrown into a state of shock. She saw Darkside disappear. Her eyes were drawn to JD's balcony, and the window into JD's room, where she saw Darkside, wrapped in a blanket, sitting next to JD. Darkside grabbed the phone.

Azz didn't know how she got there, but she was suddenly on JD's balcony with a dim recollection, that had to have been an illusion caused by running too fast, that she'd somehow flown. She hadn't come through the rest of the house, that was for sure. She leaped over to Darkside, threw her arms around him, and much to his surprise, kissed him square on the lips, then hugged him some more, body shaking.

Darkside explained, then, about the illusion of himself he'd placed in the pond to bind the spirits against doing more harm. "I was only there for the first day," he said. "After that, I hid out here." The cats seemed to have loved him, and he'd done a lot of organizing of the candles.

Then I woke. Evidently the exorcism had been a success and the business was saved.

We have to talk...

[00:08] silenceshadow: ...My changed situation with [Darkside] means major changes inside my head, which means we've got to figure out everything all over again.
[00:12] Adam: oy
[00:12] silenceshadow: you and I have never had to deal with me being unpartnered and screwing around with you. I've always, in my heart, been with [Darkside].
[00:13] Adam: ohhhh
[00:13] silenceshadow: I've never been "your woman" .... I've always been "[Darkside's] woman on loan to you"