Despertar

just to say i did

I know, I know. It's been too long. I was trying to save up whatever I have to say, if anything, for the start of a new round of Follow the Leader, but sign-ups are incredibly slow going, so.

It's all, just, whatever. I've been eating shitty food for the last three days straight, after an impressive stint of healthy eating and working out like a maniac, and the shitty food is making me feel, appropriately, pretty shitty. There's mock-premenstrual pressure in my abdomen, and it's all the more annoying because I'm not premenstrual. It's making small things even more aggravating than usual. Walking to class in the rain. Listening to skinny white girls complain about their fat thighs. Not having seen Justin since before Easter, et cetera.

I'll be glad when the school year ends, but then again, I won't. I've been telling people, everyone who asks, that I'm looking forward to summer because I'm psyched about my job, and I'm not sure how this lie got started, but it is definitely a lie. No matter how well I ever do at anything, no matter how much praise I receive on my "stellar work product" (one of my key strengths, supposedly, from last year, but to me it sounds like a code phrase for "general written coherence," which I take for granted and don't consider a strength), I'll still be the youngest, the greenest, the least experienced summer associate at the firm. People will still look at me and wonder, what is she doing here, she can't even make eye contact when a partner is speaking to her. Driven, butch female coworkers will still offer me backhanded compliments about my skirt suits, lines like Wow, you make this place feel like a fashion show.

And it'll get hot, and my skin will turn the color of burnt toast, and my hair will turn the color of Cherry Coke, and anyone who ever gets it into his head to fuck me will be too fatigued from his forty-mile commute to bother.

*

And he's stressed, understandably so, and for the second time in my life, I'm bearing the primary brunt of someone else's hard shift. His firm dissolved, he lost his summer offer. This is happening to lots of people, but it happened to him, and I was shocked. I was excited for him; I was even okay with the fact that he'd be eight hours away by car, because I was going to visit twice; I've never been there. And however spoiled and insulated this makes me sound, Ernie, he was literally the first person in my immediate circle to be affected by the recession. The first person to lose a job, to have to rearrange his entire fiscal plan for the 2009-10 school year to reflect the fact that he won't have an income.

And then he turned grumpy, and then he found a new job to apply for, and then he turned into a work zombie because his grades are more important now than they ever have been, considering he doesn't have a guaranteed offer after graduation anymore. His even temper keeps him from cracking, but I can hear it, he's bending. And I have a job, so I can't offer commiseration or sympathy that doesn't sound like pity. I have to play the dutiful black woman and keep bolstering his spirits without emasculating him, but I'm too young and too stupid to do it convincingly. I say sexy things about his upper arm strength when he's got nine hours of Bankruptcy reading to do. I insist that he walk me to my car when it's dark so he remembers there are still dangers against which he can protect us.

I think about sex all the time, suddenly, which always happens when I'm having less of it. I feel terrible even proposing it when we've both got these monstrous responsibilities looming. How does anyone ever make a baby after taking on a mortgage, I wonder? Besides which, these headaches we get, now, they strike whenever, for no reason at all, and it terrifies me that he'll be present next time that nauseous bright-light feeling hits, and I'll realize he isn't the cure, we're not impervious when we're together.

But then our silence breaks, we see each other after four or six days of not and we can't do it fast enough. We shed all that weight and for a few minutes we're just twentysomethings again. He's always known what he's doing, but now he knows what he's doing with me, and I'm constantly wanting more of it, even as it's in progress. And that's a frustration all its own, and when summer comes, there will be ten- and twelve-hour days I'll survive only by chasing the dangling carrots of bare-legged foreplay and his suntanned laugh, and I don't want to press too hard now or I'll eat them all up.

*

I need technical training. I wrote profiles of my central and peripheral characters. I sink into different personas when I've got nothing else going on mentally, and I'm coming to terms with the fact that I just am one of the sisters, which is a sign of readiness, I guess, but I maintain that I have no idea what I'm doing. How many characters am I allowed to juggle, to expect a reader to remember? Four? Seven? Is it subjective?

Is my point-of-view angle a gimmick? Is my male character a caricature, do I just not understand men and that's why he's so horny? Am I ripping off Kingsolver?

Have to write dialogue but don't as well as Aaron, which is a discouraging factor. Have to research seventies-era law school conditions for black students, and let's face it, research makes any project less attractive. Have to draw up some sort of rationale to justify actually working on this thing when there are exams to ace and kitchens to clean.

Can't be too obvious, can't be too obscure.

Come back to this later: How to trick a reader into thinking you know what you're doing?

*

Will you won't you join the dance.

Follow the Leader  (13+) Round 12 open for sign-ups! #1378797 by mood indigo