blurring_the_edges_57_never_in_focus birdmad The first few weeks after your mom died are strange and feel more than a little bit unreal. Andrew comes to the house every Saturday morning and brings the kids. The washer and dryer that came with their apartment are total pieces of shit, so you told him to feel free to use the one here at the house It's nice to have them over. Andrew's wife works weekends so you only occasionally see her. For the most part she keeps the same kind of hours at the cosmetics plant where she works as you keep at SineWave. Not having kids, it works well enough for you, but from how stressed she alwayus seems when you see her, that sort of shift doesn't agree with her as well. When you went back to work, everyone was surprised to see you back so soon. A couple of people thought it almost in appropriate that you had barely been gone for just over a week. To be honest, it almost seemed too long, just because being predominantly alone and idle with your grief left you too vulnerble to it. It's nice to immerse ourself in your work and try as best as you can to leave it behind. When you finally return Teri's call, she gets upset with you when her query about how your mom is doing is met with the news that she is gone. "Oh my god, why didn't you tell me before it happened, i could have been there for you." "I tried, but you never returned any of my calls, remember?" "God, I'm sorry. I've been a bitch lately, haven't i?" "I wouldn't go THAT far, Teri." "No, I have, I never even told you why i was so pissy during the last part of our trip to San Francisco." "I was wondering about that, but i figured i'd let you tell me on your own time." "After we split up at that club and i left with that girl i spent the night with, we stopped somewhere else and i ran into Marie, my ex. I don't know what it is about her that makes me so shitty to deal with sometimes." "Some people have that effect on us." "Anyway, Alex, I'm sorry i took it out on you, but i just couldn't handle that you were having so much better a time than i was with the whole thing. I mean you're not even queer and just about every other straight person i've known would have been a total tight-ass on a trip like that. On top of my little run-in with Marie, it weirded me out how at home you were with it." "I didn't survive all of my little adventures up til now by sticking out. Besides, remember, i've spent most of the last few years with a small army of gay friends and business partners" "Fair enough." Even after spending a few assorted weekends together, the closeness that you used to have with Teri is mostly gone. By the time your birthday rolls around seeral months later, you have stopped seeing each other completely. No bang, no whimper, just a sort of sigh. That first Christmas without your mom was hard, the whole family simmered with an awkward tension rooted in old arguments that had never been settled but were set aside while the family put up a unified front for your mom. You have no stake in the arguments and on more than one occasion you have told the others that you don't appreciate being caught in the middle of their fights. By the time summer comes around, the night shift is discontinued after two years and based on how badly the management treatsd the technicians that had been working nights you have decided that you are tired of working at SineWave and that in addition to the plum tech position you just landed at a new firm, you decide that you can burn your bridges on the way out. The roomates you've let in, co-workers who are also planning to quit SineWave laugh approvingly as you make your exit. Later that week, the new job falls through and you are forced to take a series of part-time positions for slightly less than you were making at SineWave. Derek and Jake, your roomates, stay on at SineWave for another two months before Jake moves out and gets promoted to the job that you were fighting with your supervisor for just before you quit. Derek gets fired a few weeks later than that but gets a temp position within a week with an electronics outfit that serves as one of the biggest defense co9ntractors in town. You become gradually more tired of how often he's late with the rent and even more annoyed with how badly he treats his girlfriend Amber, for whom you are hiding a very strong attraction. Having started out as buddies, you ask him respectfully to dispense with the locker-room talk about what they were up to in what used to be your old bedroom. You dismiss it as an issue of manners when he asks why, and he turns out to be just dum,b enough to believe it. In a half drunken moment, you allow him to invite two of his other friends, Aaron and Jenna to rent the room Jake had been renting. They turn out to be completely insufferable and are even worse about paying rent on time than Derek. They balk when you propose a rent increase, but they are paying you less than they'd pay for any kind of space in town. You remind them that they have caused all of the bills to go up and aren't really balancing the equation like they did. By the time a year has passed since your mom died, you see Teri one last time before she moves back east to her grandmother's having gotten a manageril position with another start-up tech company that's setting up shop near her hometown. Your last date with Teri is a club show at the Atomic Cafe, Christian Death with N17 and a forgettable local band. The show is good, the evening is probably one of the last good times you have in quite some time because in your house with the cancerous creatures you've taken in, everything else is going to hell. You long to get good and high, but all of your new positions subject you to periodic piss tests and the last thing you want to do while in your suddenly dire financial straits is to flunk the whiz_quiz. To add to the indignity, Derek totals his car and for the extra gas money he has agreed to chip in, you find yousrself playing chauffeur to Amber and Derek. The only upshot to this iends up being the times when you drive her back across town to her house without Derek and in the long copnversations you manage to have with her you discover her to be not just lovely, but genuinely interesting. In the meantime however, everything is going to hell. And it will get a whole lot worse, before it starts getting anywhere near better. But that is another story. FIN 041109 what's it to you? who go blather from