Freaky Tuesday

I have yet to decide whether Tuesday was a good day or a bad day. I was going to write about it at 2am when I was not speaking, but I couldn’t form words. I’m still recovering now.

Where to start? The start, I suppose. Got up, went to work, came home again. That was all normal, with no hints at how the evening would take a drastic turn for the… weird. Things remained stable all through my art class, even. After art class, I’d arranged to go see Mare, because, y’know, she had my jersey. I had to collect it, obviously.

She opened the door for me, and she was wearing a skirt. A femmy, floaty, yet short skirt, even. I almost proposed right there on the spot. Somehow I restrained myself, however. She offered me a coffee, which of course I accepted, and we sat on the couch and chatted for a while.

I don’t even remember how the conversation got to this point, but it turns out that she knows Cynthia. Yes, my first girlfriend Cynthia.

How random is that?

Not as random as this: It turns out she has naked pictures of Cynthia. Jesus Jones, I laughed my freakin’ ass off. Mare did a fine arts degree, majoring in photography, Cynthia modelled for some of her folio. Very tasteful, of course, but that was not at all what I expected to see on an otherwise normal Tuesday.

Also, not only does she know Cynthia, but we figured that we must’ve been at some of the same parties, back when I was a wee 18 year old and she was a wee 22 year old. She even came to some of the Sappic Football Stars games, but we couldn’t figure out whether that was at the same time as I was playing on the team.

I was about to leave when Mare mentioned that she was thinking about going to a New Age fair on Sunday, and wondered if I’d like to go too. I tried not to grin too broadly when I said yes.

So I drove home, belting out Melissa Etheridge songs all the way. Don’t think I’m joking.

This isn’t all that weird, I hear you saying. Sure, a little bit unexpected but nothing extraordinary has happened and Mary’s already driving home.

The weirdness kicked in with avengeance when I got home. I’d left some lights on when I went out because I knew it would be dark by the time I got home. It’s pitch-black at my place at night – not a street light for miles in every direction. But when I drove up the driveway, I could see no lights shining in my windows. At first I thought there had been a power-cut, but when I got inside, it became clear that this wasn’t so. For a start, the lights happily went on when I flipped the switch. And stuff had been moved and poked through.

Nothing had been taken, as far as I could tell, but someone had obviously been in my house. I assumed it was my father, until I noticed that he hadn’t opened his mail. I rang him to check, and he hadn’t been out my way all night. None of my friends, no one I know would just walk into my home when I wasn’t there. And if they did for some reason (if they really really needed the bathroom or something), they’d leave a note to let me know they had been there.

Someone had been in my house. I’m a girl alone, living in a funny little house in the middle of nowhere, ten minutes flat run to the nearest neighbours, and some stranger had been in there poking around. They knew the whole layout of the house, all the exits and hiding places, and they could have still been out there. I locked the doors and got my hunting knife out of its hiding place and clutched it in my hand.

As freaky as that was, it was this relatively small thing which upset me more.

I called Sloopy, and she was in a bad way. There is a guy she has incredibly strong feelings about. I have never known Sloopy to really fall for a guy. Or, to be honest, even halfway fall for a guy. Until this one. She’d been making eyes at him for months from afar, when she wound up at his Bon Voyage party, invited by friends of friends. He was moving to the other side of the world, which didn’t worry her all that much, cos at the time she’d never really had a whole conversation with him. But at the party they got to talking, and got on like a house on fire. They exchanged email adresses and promised to keep in contact. An obsessive, email-a-day semi-relationship ensued.

All this happened a couple of months ago. The drama is in the fact that he came home last week. Except Sloopy’s moving up here, to the other end of the island. Even that wouldn’t have been a problem, for the boy had planned to come to art school in a town much closer to here, where they may have managed to conduct a not-too-long-distance relationship.

The drama came in the form that the boy changed his mind about coming to art school and has decided to stay in Sloopy’s hometown. Not only that, but he gave the whole spiel, as boys do, about not being ready for a relationship, things moving too fast, needing time and space etc etc.

So Sloopy was a wreck. I’ve never known her to be a wreck before, but as she was saying, repeatedly, this sort of thing never happens to her, and it seems so unfair that it shouldn’t work out.

I cannot possibly count the number of times I’ve been on the phone to Sloopy in a tragic state over some drama or another. But this was the first time that the roles had been reversed.

I couldn’t do a blessed thing to help. Anything I said made things worse. I had no useful adive or consoling words. All the times Sloopy’s turned a whole situation around for me… I swear, I’d be dead at least twice over and insane probably ten times over if not for Sloopy… and I couldn’t help her at all, even once.

I felt so terribly bad. I felt like such a failure as a friend… It sounds melodramatic, but I really nearly cried myself to sleep over this.

(And y’know, it seems like Tuesday should have been a bad day, the last two incidents far outweighing the first. And even the prospect of going to a New Age Fair with Mare ought to be overshadowed by Ali-induced angst.

But y’know, I’m just really happy about it).