improbable_romance werewolf jarissa always just figured when she was little that god had made either a mistake or had a special purpose for her. because she couldn't seem to care really about the things other people cared about. mistake or special purpose really depended on whether or not she believed in god, and then whether or not it was a god that made mistakes, and then whether or not even if there was a god if there was such thing as purpose (because what kind of infinite god would have any purpose? what would one drop in the bucket that wasn't really adding or taking away in any permanent way matter?). and she wavered on these issues but it wasn't a huge deal. it didn't seem like it would interfere with a normal life at first. it was just not really liking volleyball, or not really caring that she got a C on the gimmie project in art class in 4th grade (there were better things to do with marshmellows and pipe cleaners than pasting them to construction paper). but she stopped being able to ignore it and first thought it might actually be a curse the night her and her friend allie (who was nicknamed alley cat because she was thin and slightly mean) had played a prank on allie's mom one night when she was sleeping over at said alley cat's house. she was a freshman in high school. allie's mom liked to fall asleep listening to swing frank sinatra music at a ridiculously loud volume to perhaps drown out the resounding emptiness of the empty side of the bed that her husband, as much of an unloyal inconsiderate person he was when awake, had filled satisfactorily in his innocent sleep before their divorce. and despite listening to this music at volume levels that had to have been recently invented knowing how deaf we're all becoming, she still would claim to be able to hear the slightest creak of the hall, and would often blame her waking up in the middle of the night on her daughter's shuffling to the bathroom, or her son's (whose name was samuel and had no nickname) loud sighing at midnight. so in the typical empathy free assertiveness of teenagedom they got the idea to replace the frank sinatra music with some particularly angry death destruction i'll kick your fuckin ass heavy metal from her brother's room, making sure the player was still set at it's usual thunderous volume. well no one had bothered to ask allie's mom's heart about how it would react to this. a heart always struggles to work properly, and when it gives up, it's usually a surprise - something it kept to itself - the driven businessman collapsing at his desk. and so when her mom came out looking like a ghost as they were bursting into hilarity, they had no idea that even if they had dialed 9-1-1 right then and there, there was a good chance it'd be too late. her divorced husband came over and her brother had to be called, and what would've normally been annoyance or grudging laughter was anger. sam's eyes which normally just kind of well sat there now seemed glassed as if they'd be permanently saying oh for the rest of eternity. allie was pretty much in some self imposed quiet corner inside of her waiting on forgiveness from the dead until her father slapped her at which point she managed a monotone "well maybe if you were here" feebly attempting perhaps to alleviate some of the guilt. jarissa for her part noticed allie's father seemed more harried at the sight of a body than the sight of the woman he onced loved's body. later in high school after she'd learned of the resentments even the most happy and punchy of couples can hold towards each other (she refused to go down on me during the drive to meet my parents for the first time that thanksgiving or he never even pretended to care about my poetry group) it made sense to her this seeming indifference, or even relief at the total erasure of a person who knew something about you. and even at that time right in the thick of it she had an intuitive feeling about it that it was best she didn't have. because as ally looked on as the emts worked on her mother, in tears and ashamed of the explanation she had to keep giving and the red handmark on her face, jarissa let out a strange laugh. it wasn't a forced or loud laugh, or particularly nervous, but more the snarky and yet impersonal laugh people give when watching some violent sports blooper on television. allie looked at her in shock, and it was then she conveniently forgot that the heavy metal music had only been a hypothetical laugh to jarissa before she insisted on actually seeing it through. it seemed jarissa was largely hypothetical, and knowing people in the real world only seemed to get her in trouble. so for her entire freshman year jarissa endured being a murderer to that group of friends and at least suspicious to the rest of the student body. it actually wasn't that bad, and it didn't really affect her popularity as people like someone who lets them cheat off of their homework and gets away with mocking the teachers. jarissa still sometimes would laugh aloud at the thought of that night. she couldn't quite explain to allie or anyone that she wasn't laughing at her or her mother or her father or the sadness that existed in their lives even before the loss of their mother cemented it or made it irretractable or however one looks at the loss of an unhappy person, rather she was laughing at her own curse. and she saw this curse pulling her this way and that again and again in so many situations. she saw school as rather lackluster, and the few hobbies she found were usually just doorways to the one thing that seemed to keep her interested, which was romance, the destruction of walls between two people and all of the possibility it always seemed to promise at its inception. still her curse got in the way of this too. while it was fine and good to believe that by loving daniel she'd break out of her normal patterns and they'd introduce new ideas to the world, their own lives, humanity for all time, she couldn't even force herself to care about the chess club she joined to meet him. and she suspected her curse would give her the upper hand in all matters the day she suggested to daniel in the middle of a chess match they were having that chess was a stupid game (even though she could see how elemental and beautiful and symbolic it was) and that she didn't really care about it. she learned something on this day, because daniel who could beat her fairly soundly at chess, started pandering to her, and from then on treated her as the upperhanded and intelligent one. she saw that being what she was and how she was was a dangerous combination. she was attractive, and boys and girls would try to extend what business they had with her if only by a little bit. perhaps it was having all of these choices always that made her bored. it seemed as if money and power were something she was born with the leverage to achieve. and yet she was rarely interested in that trade. she had had good sex and bad sex by her junior year in high school, and she still mainly went for people who seemed to have some passionate interest, that guided or filled their lives. she had no patience for people who wanted her to fill them. so there was after bobby fischer the football player, and the jazz musician, and even the english teacher, and even then even the truckdriver. however, just because she seemed misalligned with most others, did not mean she did not have sadness. she felt human like a wolf might feel surrounded by dogs, as if she was vestigal, or outdated. one night she stayed up late writing in her journal, listening to music, and doing all of those other things she actually could share with others because they weren't so slow and boring as trying to protect and hold onto life and your heart can be. and she heard an argument between two lovers outside in the streets. it reminded her of another night she had heard lovers arguing in the street. she had been in 5th grade looking out the window at them and thinking about how no one knew what they were arguing about, whether they had just met or had been doing this for centuries and her parents looked outside and shook their heads. she knew then that she'd never be there. what was so worth yelling about anyways? years later, after she'd had boyfriends and jobs which granted weren't the settling jobs and boyfriends that adults had, but contained the same grim implications none the less, she was less judgemental about them. the next day she skipped school. her parents would be mad, but luckily at local public school's the state largely took the fact that you even tried going to school in pretty good faith and would forgive a day or two even unexcused. she stopped into a church and prayed that her curse would never hurt others. she did this rather melodramatically as if she was a universal horror star: "may the dreaded curse of my eternal night never poison the sunny life of another." then she walked up the aisle and curtsied and left. on her way out she couldn't help but thinking about that night with allie who she now never spoke with, and as usual she laughed. she walked into a bar down the street from the church and sat down next to those with a different type of spiritual bent. she was only seventeen but had a fake id. if you didn't have a fake id at her school it was like telling kids you didn't have a tv in your house. on a sidenote, jarissa loved tv. she noticed a man in the bar who seemed kind in his demeanor to the female bartender (regulars in a bar seem to have no choice but to drop the charade of confidence and wholeness that most employ when hitting on someone or trying to sell them something) and in the five minutes she discreetly watched him from behind her scotch over ice, she noticed more recognizeable emotions than she had ever bothered to catalogue wash distinctly over his face as if telling some story he'd heard before. she went to talk to him. as drunks sometimes are wont to do, he invited her into the middle of the conversation without debriefing. "you think it's a happy ending, you have the boy and the girl, and you reach the landmark in the distance only to find more distance." "my name's jarissa" "i wouldn't of guessed that...and you know the thing is, you have to keep doing it, even after you reach there." "well what did you expect, to be able to sit there like a display in a museum?" he laughed. "my name is sal." to make a long story short, this was a day that neither sal nor jarissa would remember distinctly except to say that it would change both of their lives while seeming largely uncluttered and uneventful on the surface. the real plot was wound up in how their faces were set to react to each little thing, was all of the stories waiting to be shared that they saw in the slightest stir of each other's hands. jarissa didn't see much special in him, other than the chance to not have to try so hard, and the desire on his part to not have to fake or force and to be forgiven as much as he seemed willing to forgive. and on second thought this was somewhat special she decided. but it was in two particular events that she decided it. first she told him the complete allie story. and he laughed immediately and even reciprocated though clearly his stories were more internally tragic and accumulated than actually right there on the surface all at once like hers was. and then the greatest moment was (after so many drinks and confessions about everything - from parents and childhoods to lovers: daniel's clunky pawn advancing sex, and the football player's often exciting and yet ineffectual in its inattentiveness enthusiasm) he asked her to marry him right there and she felt that old feeling like the walls were falling and perhaps all of the walls she felt everywhere would fall as well. but she hesitated and they were now loud as drunks are sometimes wont to do. and he said, "come on, i thought nothing mattered to you." and they were walking together like boxers circling each other outside of the bar and it was now nighttime as many hours had passed. and jarissa said, "fuck you" and sal said "you're a typical teenager." and jarissa thought, we're just like those lovers i heard. and she felt like what he was offering really would be love to someone else. and why not her? and she thought, i am just like those lovers i heard twice. and it made her feel like a side character in her own story. and that feeling was the closest she'd felt to love, and she felt it towards sal, tottering there confidently and totally unguarded as if drunkedness really was ultimate wisdom. it made her feel real, as if one day she could have a heart attack and actually look shocked like a ghost, and people would actually cry, as if she could turn this curse into someone else's blessing. she walked towards him quickly, with an energy teenagers don't need to be movie stars to exude, and they kissed, and suddenly being different felt so large and wonderful. 040623 ... doar . 040809 ... marked I wish doar would stop dot-marking everything I want to dotmark. . 040810 ... :-) thhhpppptttt...... 040810 ... birdmad so far, seemingly all of them. 040810 ... stork daddy wow. that was the first thing i've written on here that i could read through at least once without getting tired of. 040810 ... They call me truth Interesting... 070117 what's it to you? who go blather from