blurring_the_edges_43_walk_around_in_circles birdmad Almost two years to the day after the first time it happened, your mom undergoes mastectomy surgery again after agreeing to go through with the same set of procedures as last time. As you are buying groceries the next day, you run into the deacon and you use all of your restraint not to strangle him as he chatters on and on about faith and the will of god. Yeah, it's easy for him to say, it isn't his mother fresh off the operating table wracked with pain. Fucking glad hand. There is no place really that you can turn this time. Last time, at least Elena was here and just by being around, she helped you through it. Between the solitude and the lingering pain of the injury which you have not yet had the ability to give a good rehab, you find that the same release you had in the heroin is just as available to you in the form of whatever happens to be in the kitchen for you to throw together and whatever spirits you can rouse from the liquor cabinet. It doesn't help that your attempt to quit smoking has caused you to eat as a substitution for your nicotine cravings. By the time Christmas rolls around, you could roll around with it as you have gone from two-eighty-seven when Meat smashed you through the wall, to a very scary three-hundred-fifteen. Jesus, Alex, if you get any bigger you will have your own zip code and gravitational pull. You are still glad that you buy most of your clothes a little on the large end of the scale so that no one can see what has happened lately, but it shows in your face now and you are looking like that ridiculous sportscaster who ran for congress last year, but with a better haircut. You finally decide that you can't take the feeling of it and decide that the excruciating pain of trying to pull yourself back into shape and get over your back problem will at least give you that bit of common ground with your mom's day to day struggles through the chemo and the radiation treatments. When you are not at work, you are in the gym or at home. It reaches the point where you are working out two and a half hours a day every day. By the time Valentine's day rolls around, you are back down below three hundred pounds and your arms legs and chest are so intensely large that it makes you think that you should paint yourself green and market yourself out as a mascot for the comic shop. When you get a series of unnamed messages on your machine, asking if you are there and saying she wants to talk, you know without any mystery at all who it is, but you decide not to call her back immediately, after all, she was always the one to tell you not to get too attached anyway. Besides, knowing that she'll just leave you hanging again, why would you risk letting her get close to you again. Besides, doesn't it still make you at least vaguely suspicious that with the exception of the last couple of months, she has shown up quickly on the heels of every other disaster in your life. IF you could attribute carcinogenic properties to her, it might not seem too far-fetched. Really, no joke, look at the past five years and see if it isn't true. Your first major rejection in life, who shows up a couple of weeks later? Your next attempt at a serious relationship ends in a miscarriage and Cassanra's very near nervous-breakdown and who calls you up literally just a few hours after you find out that Cassie went back to her family in Louisiana? You've joked to yourself sometimes that you wonder if she isn't stalking you. God knows she did teach you the finer points of keeping tabs on someone and scouting a situation ripe for criminal mischief. Would it really be so absurd to think that in her all-encompassing boredom, she can find nothing better or more entertaining to do that fuck with you and your mind? Elena leaves, a few days later Zoe shows up again. Elena shows up one day, the next day you are cutting up Tripod Billy. Inspite of the sawed-off Mossberg that was sitting on the floor of the Cadillac, she leaves you in the hands of Billy and Henry the first time a situation goes bad, and then she doesn't even have the courtesy to sound concerned when it appeared you were dead from the valium cocktail that found you waking up in a shallow grave. At this point, you are happy to have just met someone who doesn't have any ties to any part of your past or much beyond your immediate present. In the last batch of hires at the plant, you couldn't help but be drawn to the petite, curvy, and rather punky looking blonde in the RX-7. You realize, of course, that you are going to have to make this move on your own since your previous reputation is evaporating while you have taken yourself off the scene. Besides, you are not Bob or Ant, so you don't feel compelled to actually tell her that you are some sort of sex fiend. Besides, your attraction to Teri isn't solely fueled by the lesser of your two heads. You've had the chance to hang around with her and a couple of other people on shift and you really like her. You invite her out to lunch one rainy Thursday afternoon and she accepts. When you offer to drive, she asks if you are willing to be the passenger in her car instead, saying that doesn't trust how beat to hell your car looks. Honestly, you can't blame her for saying so, your car is starting to look like shit, and hell knows that with all the extra mileage you put on it when you get the wild hair up your ass to go driving aimlessly around town, it can't have too much more life left in it. Opening up a little black container, she drops a CD in the car stereo as you pull out of the parking lot. Nine Inch Nails "Happiness in Slavery" proceeds to scare the ever living piss out of the small cluster of middle-aged church ladies who used to enjoy bugging you when you were the lead repair operator. You can't helped but be charmed when she lets out a big "WHOOOOOO!" at them through the window as the red Mazda peels out and heads north on 7th Street trying to get to this fast Chinese take out place you know of just up the road a little way. When you get your food and are headed back, in near record time, you ask her if she is busy this weekend. To your relief she says that being fairly new in town, she doesn't have any plans and would like to do something. "Yeah, between being new in town and since i just broke up with my girlfriend Marie, i was afraid i was going to have to start getting used to weekends by myself, and i hate that." "Girlfriend?" you ask, sounding a little intrigued. "Yeah, i thought you figured it out already... I'm gay." "Oh." you say, neutrally. Although you have to mask a little bit of disappointment that she didn't say "bi" because regardless of how altruistic the majority of your interest in her may be, you are still a man attracted to this woman. She talks you into going halves on tickets to a concert called "Spring on the Green" over at Mesa Amphitheatre. You enjoy the entirety of the Cocteau Twins set when midway through the set by Lush, she takes you by the hand and says "I'm over it, let's go get my car and take a drive." Before you can even protest, you decide that going wherever she might lead could be amusing and at the very least, someone this impulsive couldn't possibly bore you. Taking the highway north out of town, you reach Sedona and its red rocks by three in the afternoon, circling around through the various little towns and not heading back until nearly nine at night. As you are making your way down from the woods between Flagstaff and Sedona, a light snow begins to fall and the music she has loaded into her CD player fits better than anything you could have ever imagined. Brendan Perry's voice on Dead Can Dance's "Anywhere Out of the World" and the sound of the instruments in the background tie together in your mind with the image of the falling snow and the dark forest. When you finally make it back to the house where she is renting a room, in a little neighborhood that sits right between Scottsdale and Tempe, it is just after eleven and you have no complaints about the day you have spent. As you walk her back inside and say goodnight, she sends you out the door with a little kiss on the cheek and follows that with "Don't get any ideas, though" and a little laugh. "No problem, pretty lady, no problem." You drive away still smiling, even though the onset of spring and the several weeks you have gone without any play have left you feeling a little keyed up. You actually manage to fall right to sleep as soon as you get into bed nearly an hour later. 030526 what's it to you? who go blather from