Not quite Wesley and Buttercup

[amul]

We begin arguing within seconds of finding each other, snapping and growling over how long it's been since we've seen each other. Later, Priceless Pearl will say of my apartment, "Wow, I haven't been here since I was married." The argument burns out quickly, just a way for us to both show that we've tried as hard as we're willing to try, a feeble acknowledgment that we can both still be hurt by the other, no matter how much armor we put on before the rest of the world. We both have the power to hurt the other, and I think this scares us, makes us avoid making plans.

Over dinner, we talk about the future, another familiar pattern. If I was sixteen, seventeen, if I were still twenty or twenty-four, I'd sit patiently through this part and wait for what I thought of then as the "real" conversation to begin. Later, we'll talk about the long thorny road which got us to where we are today, and I wonder when the future became more important to me than the past.

On the beach, under the moon, she curls her legs around mine for warmth. The children we once were, who ached for each other without ever understanding those needs, grow tense and expectant. PPearl grabs the blanket she had been sitting on a few minutes earlier, and pulls it over both of us. I mock aloud the child inside of me, If this was high school, I'd be congratulating myself on being so slick rig....awgh! as the moving blanket slaps my face with thrown sand.

When I clear the sand from my eyes, the first girl I ever kissed is inches from my face, looking into my eyes with an openness I once hungered for. She purrs to me, "Did you say something, Slick?"

.....

She sings to me, her body tangled with mine, her eyes locking with mine and darting away. She sings to me under the moon, on the shore, one hand tracing my thigh unconsciously as the Boy Romantic inside me searches for fuel in the cold ashes of a love from long ago. It is the strangest sort of relief, to feel no fire kindled there....

.....

"I'm writing a new song," she murmurs. "A young eager knight sees a damsel in a locked tower and calls up, I will free you from your captors! You can't, she calls to him. I will save you, he insists. You can't, she tells him, because she has locked herself in that tower. There is no evil wizard, no dragon, the only one keeping her locked up inside is herself. The heroic knight protests, But if I don't save you from that tower, then I must ride on alone and friendless! Seeing his distress, the princess rushes from her tower to save him, and they ride off together."

That's a good story, I tell her. Did I ever tell you about Archetyped!, the story I've been working on for so long? It starts with a man telling his friend about how before Prince Charming, there was a young man named Prince Earnest who tried to wake Sleeping Beauty. When he could not save her, he tried to save the world. When he could not save the world, he tried to set it aflame and the fires burned until he learned that she had awoken.

I want a scene where the hero says, "I met a medusa in the ruins of Irem who reminded me of you. Did you know that medusae were women once? Men poison their minds with the blackest lies until their hair grows venomous. Men hunt them with one kind of spear until they become monsters, and then they hunt them with a different kind of spear. This medusa, she had the same shy way of avoiding my gaze, of wavering between the urge to trust or torture me."

PPearl leans in slightly closer, though we never come very close. We have learned through hard years of trial and grievous error that our bodies must maintain a certain distance, to avoid a deeper kind of peril. Her hair is caught by the wind, and for a few seconds seems to dance of its own accord, before a long strand wraps around my neck. "How does it end?"

Well, it's a story, I untangle her hair and lightly push it back across her cheek, So he saves the world, and the gods offer him any gift he asks for. He asks to be with her forever, but does not ask them to make her love him.

She matches my gesture, although my hair is far too short to ever get wind-tossed. "That's a good story, too."

.....

As I drop her off at Union Station, Nick Cave is singing "I don't believe in an interventionist god / But I know, darling, that you do...."

I stop the engine, and we walk into the station as she explains more about the strange politics of her biological mother's family, and the odd place she has been finding in it for herself. "When [my mother] died, some of them were practically relieved that no one could contradict the lies they tell about her anymore. But she told me her side, and I --- I think it's important for the rest of her children to hear that story when they're old enough to understand it. I'm not defending the choices she made because at a certain point you have to stop blaming the source and start dealing with the hand you've been dealt, but I think her children should know the truth. Whatever her faults, whatever she did, it began when that man raped her and her mother threw her out for it. Call [my mother] what you want, but she never chose a man over her own daughter. That story needs to be told."

Her story, or yours? Are you trying to save her, or you?

"That's just it, it could have been my story. Change just a few details, not even very much. But I think it's her that I'm trying to protect, partly because I don't think I can tell my story without telling hers first."

Ah, but don't you see? The best way to tell your story is in your quest to discover hers. We'll tell your story in flashbacks as you come back home from your adventures. You go out and find the people who really knew, and they tell her story. Then you come back here and catch me up, and we do flashbacks to the parallels of your life. My only regret is that when they make this into a Lifetime Channel mini-series, all MY best bits will get covered up by flashbacks.

"But don't you think it's weird that I'm -- I'm raising up her sword? Especially when you think about --- oh, look, there he is!" She interrupts herself, leaping up to rush into the arms of a man I haven't met yet. She hugs him, kissing and laughing with him, and leads him by the hand to me. "This is him, the friend I've been telling you about for so long."

Unneeded words, and I know that she's saying them as much to reassure me that I am still a part of her life, as she is by way of introduction. We shake hands, exchange a few words before they clasp hands again and board the train together. A goodbye was in there somewhere, and a promise to see each other more often.

That's the pattern of it.