I Thought You Would Never

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Here's how it was supposed to happen:

After college, I packed up and moved. Fled. Flew to you, literally and figuratively. When I got off the plane and past security and saw you standing there waiting for me, the only thing I could think about was how, this time, I wouldn't be leaving again in a week. I was here to stay this time. I was home.

I got a job, maybe at the hospital near where you lived, maybe not. You'd gotten your degree about the same time I had -- maybe a little before, maybe a little after, the details aren't important. We got married. Six, seven years waiting for life to begin, and now it finally had.

We had an apartment and a cat -- or two, or three, though I would've balked at four. Life wasn't perfect, and it wasn't always easy or even pleasant, but we managed to muddle through somehow. Sometimes in the evenings we would watch Star Trek together and I would pity all the rock stars and kings and millionaires of the world because they weren't here, arms wrapped around you, feeling your heartbeat, your breath.

We never had kids, of course. Neither of us ever wanted them in the first place; and our lives were full enough without them. We never needed them. We had each other.

Eventually we left the apartment for a house somewhere, a small one, enough room for you and me and the cats. Maybe even a place on the street you showed me once -- remember? -- sweet little homes on garden lots with tall, leafy shade trees lined up by the curb. Walking distance to the international market, all the Pocky we could carry. You used to pass that street on the bus and dream. Wherever we wound up, though, it was home.

We grew older together, and it turned out to be as simple and good as we had always imagined, back when we were stuck thousands of miles away from each other. Life went on, and we went with it, and it was the same as it had ever been since it started that day we married. Mostly happy. Mostly good.

Eventually we both retired, still together, still you and me and maybe a cat. You were my world. I was happy to be yours as long as you wanted. We had forty years, fifty? -- not much more, probably, I was already edging towards 30 by the time I graduated -- but we had decades, and we never fell apart like my parents did, never drifted away like your parents did. It was like a fairy-tale romance, if there was ever a fairy tale with more frogs than princes.

But eventually, of course, one of us died. Maybe both. Maybe there was a gas leak, both of us going peacefully in our sleep. Our bodies found together with your head still on my shoulder. Better that than the alternative. If it came down to that, though, I'd be willing to be the survivor. Waking up each morning, knowing that this is yet another day in a long, long string of them without you: it hurts more than anything else I've ever experienced; and I've had an organ slowly fail, undiagnosed, over the course of years. I wouldn't want you to have to go through this, and so I'd be willing to be the survivor, again. At least I'd be at the end of my life, instead of still staring decades more of it down. Nobody bats an eye when one eighty-year-old dies and the other follows a week later.

That's how it was supposed to happen, plus or minus a few details: you, me, a good half-century of happy married life together.

Apparently it would've made us Pluggers, but who cares about that?


Way to go, Pluggers. I know that you're better than me because you don't bother with ridiculous citified things like computers, cable TV, paved roads, or basic sanitation; but do you have to rub it in by reminding me that you get to have your Twu Wuvs not die young, too? I mean, really. Apparently I missed the one where Brookins illustrated "Pluggers are big mean jerks".

All of this fic is true, or at least as true as an alternate history of the future can be. I have school notebooks going back to about 2001 where the back pages, unneeded for class, are filled with daydreams of a similar nature... though of course there was more hope involved when it was still, y'know, actually possible. Mine is a sad and kind of pathetic story. I'm just glad I got my gothy-poetry phase out in high school, so I haven't had to sink quite that far again.

"Mostly happy. Mostly good." is a bit I have lifted from Neil Gaiman's "The Wedding Present," from Smoke and Mirrors. It's in the introduction, not in the table of contents. It's very good, although I can't really read it anymore. Maybe because it's too good. Way to go, Gaiman.

Towels

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I never go anywhere without my towel.

All right, so that's not entirely true. I go plenty of places without my towel, mainly because it's sometimes rather inconvenient to lug a lump of terrycloth around. But it's always in my backpack, which is always with me on campus, so I at least only sometimes go anywhere without my towel. It's one of those life lessons you pick up from such people as the late great sage Douglas Adams.

The towel I carry is one that could easily be considered an antique, as bath towels go. I've had it in my possession since the last century, and before that it belonged to a friend; the pile was already worn to nubbins by the time I gained possession some time around 1997. I have no idea how long its previous owner had it. It could well be older than some of my fellow-students at Good-Sized Midwestern University, on whose campus I happen to be sitting right now.

Its design was, at one time, a swirl of brightly-colored musical notes, though by now everything's sort of munged together into a vaguely purply-blue-reddish-yellowish blur. Its seams are holding up wonderfully well, though I should probably take a needle to it at some point, because it's not going to last many more washings before something gives. If I could do something to make it last forever, I probably would.

The thing about a bath towel is that it isn't necessarily only for bathing with. You can soak up other things with it -- a spilled can of Coke, for instance. You can wrap a book or an mp3 player in it on a rainy day, so that said object stays dry, safe, non-warped and non-shorted-out. You can whip it out when the temperature's below freezing, lay it on a cement bench, and thus sit down without acquiring frostbite of the butt. You can lay it on the muddy ground by a beautiful lake, sit on it with the person you love most in the world, and enjoy one of the very last days you will ever spend by that person's side before they suddenly die without warning.

These are just some of the things I have done with my towel.

Tire

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We lived in an apartment for a while, when I was around seven or eight; it had a little playground in the middle, with swings and climbing bars and things like that. Over to one side of the normal swings there was a tire swing. I never liked it very much.

Part of it might've been the way it was mounted; the stereotypical tire swing is just a tire hung over a tree limb with a rope, swinging freely and hopefully not in the direction of the trunk. (Splat.)

This tire swing, though, was hung UFO-style, with four chains spaced around the top all connected to a central point. Up to four kids could sit on the tire, knees bumping against each other in the center hole, or backs to each other and legs swinging free around the tire's outer edge. The chains were hooked up to a thing that spun both clockwise and counter-. And that, basically, was the tire swing. It could swing back and forth a little, but the chains didn't have much give. Mainly kids would sit on it and get someone to set it spinning.

Say what you will about ways to have fun, but I find that spinning rapidly in circles while inhaling the tarry smell of an old tire gets unfun fast.

This is not to say that I didn't play on the tire swing sometimes. Kids have short attention spans, and no doubt at times everything else in the playground seemed so boring that self-imposed dizziness presented a viable alternative. Still, as much as the stereotypical idyllic childhood involves long summers spent swinging under the branch of the ol' apple tree, I'm afraid I seem to have missed out.

At least I graduated from regular playground usage early enough to mostly avoid those modern hamster-tubing monstrosities they make by recycling tires. If I want to feel like a small rodent, I'll chew on some sunflower seeds.



Yeah, so this one is autobiographical, not fiction. I'm allowed.

Marketing

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Bah, way to wreck one of the semi-autobiographical fics by skipping a week of archives, gocomics.com...

I'm currently (04/14/2010) looking for the image to this one. It was something about, like, there are a lot of commercials for denture cream and life insurance and stuff during the daytime soaps and gameshows and what have you. Thus, marketing. Plugger marketing, I suppose, since I tagged the post with comic.plugger tech.

Stay tuned for possible future pictoral update!

"Oh, dear, don't you remember?", Mother replied. "Today they're airing Marie's episode of The Price Is Right! You weren't going to the store just now, were you?"

Emma shifted the phone to her other hand. "No, I didn't remember that." She walked into the living room, grabbed the television remote and sat down on the couch. "I can wait until it's over to go."

"Well I should hope so!" Mother sounded so matter-of-fact that Emma had to smile. "Marie's only been wanting to meet Bob Barker for ages, and then when she finally got her ticket she was so excited -- "

"Did she actually meet him?" Emma answered distractedly as she flipped through the channels. "I mean, I don't think they do unless they actually get to go up and all."

"Well, no. But she said it was a thrill all the same. Are you watching it yet?"

"Mmm. Yes. I always know I've got the right channel when the commercials for scooters and Centrum Silver come up."

On the other end of the phone, her mother chuckled. "It's all about knowing your audience, dear. The only people who watch this show are children home sick and old women like Marie and me."

"Hey! Where does that leave me, then?" Emma replied, and they both laughed at that. Then a commercial for denture cream ended, to be replaced by one touting life insurance. Emma's laughter cut off quickly, and there was a pause for a few moments.

Finally Mother spoke up. "I know you still miss him, dear. Death is never easy to deal with, and when it's so unexpected it's even worse. But eventually the memories will stop hurting so much. You believe that, don't you?"

Emma closed her eyes. "I've certainly been told it by enough people," she answered quietly. "But I don't know what I believe anymore."

Silence then but for the rattle of cheerful game-show music; loudly, from Emma's own television set; and, more quietly, floating down the line, echoing as though from a very great distance.



Meh. Fairly obvious bit of fictionalized self-insertion here. Well, "write what you know" and such, I guess.