Avel and the Alien, Part 2

Check out Part 1 (or any of my other mostly fictional blog series) before you start reading! -m

We went into the house and I made Avel lay on the kitchen counter so Fuzz and I could be on the same level.  I grabbed a pair of kitchen shears and found one of the tentacles under the green fur.  I placed it between the blades.

"OK, brace yourself," I said, and squeezed.

Nothing happened.  Well, something happened, of course.  There was a ton of screaming from both Avel and the thing.  But the scissors didn't do their job.  In fact, they snapped in half.

"Crap," I said.

Avel was moaning.  "That hurt!"

"Sorry.  Want me to try again?" I reached for the tentacle again, even as Avel yelled at me to stop.  The green creature made unhappy sounds and dug its barbed tubies deeper into the side of Avel's waist.

"Stop!" Avel bellowed.

I let go and the fuzzy thing settled back down.  "What's your problem?"  I growled, annoyed with his tone.  "I'm trying to help."

"Well, you're hurting more than your helping."  He sighed heavily  and pulled himself to a sitting position.  He was really pale and covered in a shiny sheen of sweat.  Avel sat still for a minute, silently inspecting his parasite. 

It was dark green and covered in fur that was thick and coarse.  There weren't any eyes, or even an "up" or "down" end.  I had no idea where the noises were coming from.  The tentacles were about the width of my pinky and edged with sharp barbs, like thorns on a rose.  Around the mouth of each tubular tentacle was a ring of those barbs, which was how the thing had attached itself to Avel.

"Can I ask you what happened, exactly?" I asked warily.  I glanced outside, where the rain was beginning to let up.

Avel didn't look up at me as he continued to carefully prod at the green thing.  "There was some sort of box in the middle of the yard.  I went to check it out and this thing jumped out and attacked me."

I grunted and walked away, tossing the broken shears in the trash on my way.

"Where are you going?" Avel asked, sounding dismayed.

"I'm gonna check out the box thing," I said.  I slid open the door and looked around.  There was a black metal box sitting in a small crater in the middle of the formerly pristine lawn.  I whistled and went over, inspecting it with my foot.  The metal was hot and the whole thing was steaming.  I looked up, half expecting to see something else in the sky.  Stray raindrops tickled my cheeks.  There was nothing but gray clouds in the sky.

Back inside, Avel was on his feet and waiting for me.

"I think it's an alien," I declared as I shut the door.

Avel rolled his eyes.  "Don't be ridiculous."

"I'm not being ridiculous.  I seriously think it is."  He still appeared skeptical.  "Well, what do you think it is?"

We both looked at the thing.  It looked like Avel had glued a green, headless stuffed animal to his shirt.

"Mutant leech?" Avel ventured.  I almost laughed, but he shuddered and I held it in.

"Alien.  Leeches don't have tentacles."

"Fine.  Here," he said.  He handed me a small bag.

"Your shaver?"  I pulled out Avel's electric shaver and flipped it on, then turned it off again.  It took me a second to catch up.  "No.  That's just nasty," I said.  "You seriously want me to shave it?"

Avel shrugged, then grabbed the hem of his shirt and pulled.  The tentacles had burned through enough of it that the shirt – which had been one of my favorites, by the way – came right off.

Even with a fuzzy green alien sticking its barbed tentacles into his skin, I couldn't help but grin at my bare-chested boyfriend.  Lord, was he attractive.  Is attractive.  Anyways.

"Why are we doing this?"  I asked.

Avel talked to me over his shoulder as he went over to the couch, which he had covered with an old sheet.  "I need to see what it looks like," he said matter-of-factly.

"Oh."  Of course.  All I could see was fur.  Without the fur, we'd be able to see what the thing really was. I tossed the shaver bag onto a chair and tried to grin.  "So, are we thinking 'buzz cut' or something a little longer?"

Avel snorted, which was probably as close to a laugh as I was going to get. "Just use the head that's on there."  He beckoned for me to follow as he lay on his side, full-length on the couch, but I was frozen.

All I could think was that something was going to go wrong, the shaver was going to slip, the alien was going to suck out all his blood, then go after me...I think they were very typical worries for when an alien leeches onto your boyfriend.

"Meli?"

"Yeah?"  I shook my head, clearing it of the mental image of a half-shaved green monster tearing me and Avel to pieces.  It wasn't very pretty.

"You gonna do it?"

"Oh.  Yeah.  Sorry."  I turned on the shaver and lowered it to the green fur.  I was shaking, my heart was pounding like crazy, and I was holding my breath.  Oh, yes.  This was going to go well.

First date, Part 1

It was May, I remember, and for Colorado, it was very green. The city smelled like dead cows and pigs, which wasn't very strange. The bright white-yellow ball of the sun burnt everything into a soft haze of happiness -- summer was close. It was so close we couldn't just taste it, we were practically eating it.

This was the atmosphere I should have known to avoid. Spring and summer, as most people know, are very dangerous times. You get the right types of people together, and they start thinking things and being sneaky, you know? But I really had no idea that I should have been more specific when talking to Kadey about Brad*. It's not really something you consider, when faced with the idea that the RA might have a crush on you. You don't think, 'Hm, I should be sure to be very clear, so nothing awkward happens.'

No. You think, 'Nothing will ever happen; he doesn't actually like me. Even if I were sure if I liked him...nah. Not possible.' That's what you think. Silly you.

So at the end of April, a week or two before finals started, when Kadey and I were hanging out in my room talking about our ridiculous roommates, I let her see the totality of my confusion.

"We're just really great friends," I said to open the conversation. First mistake, obviously. Classic. Kadey grinned at me.

"That's what they all say before they fall in love," she said. I whacked her with a book.
"Shut up. I mean, really. We just hang out and stuff. I don't think I like him."
"You don't think you like him?" I opened my mouth but no sound came out.

"He's really nice," I said, finally, and with only a little conviction. I suddenly felt as though I did like him, immensely, but the thought terrified me and seemed false. Kadey raised an eyebrow at me and looked down at the homework in her lap, pretending to work on it. "Oh shut up," I said, knowing what she was thinking. She tucked her short brown hair behind an ear and grinned like a second-grader.

"What're you gonna do when he confesses his love for you?" she asked. I scoffed. The nerve of her.
"Brad is not going to confess his love for me. I just happen to be the only sane girl in this whole dorm," I said. "Besides you, of course. But you don't talk to boys." This time I was the one who had to dodge a book, and I did so while laughing.
"I do too! I just only talk to the intelligent ones. Plus Brad doesn't think I'm pretty like he thinks you are," she said. She had to have been taunting me. I rolled my eyes and chose not to say anything in reply. The conversation continued in much the same vein, and in the end I was more unsure of whether I really liked Brad or not, or if the thought of Damien not being there was messing me up.

Damien was...that boy. That one that you think about all the time even though you hate yourself for it. He was charming and detested it. He was cooler than me, so of course I was charmed. But he was gone, and Brad wasn't. I did eventually stop dreaming about Damien, but in this moment, I thought I could never truly like someone like Brad with Damien's promise lurking in the air:
"I'll be back this summer."

A week after talking to me, Kadey was hanging out with the RAs at the coffee shoppe. She didn't tell me where she was; I'm pretty sure I was chilling with Jack or Lilie or both. Who knows. So I didn't find out anything about the following until after what happened after the next thing. The coffee outing was apparently spontaneous, and in the midst of the other RAs, Brad nudged Kadey with his elbow and bent his head down to say something in a low sort of voice.

"Hey, so, I was wondering. Does Genevieve... I mean... do you think she would go out with me?"
"Are you asking me to ask her?" Brad, I guess, had smiled at this point, as he briefly considered the suggestion.
"No," he said. "I just wanted to, you know, make sure." The other RAs turned and paid attention. Alexis had heard my name and motioned for the others to pay attention. Everyone knew that Kadey was my best friend on campus. She (of all people) would know if I had a crush on Brad or not. I like to imagine that at this point, Kadey paused and gathered her thoughts before saying anything. I like to think that she took her time, drawing the possibilities out into the air with her loaded silence.

"You're going to ask her out?" she asked.
"I think so," Brad said. Maybe he was watching his fingers, maybe he was looking into Kadey's eyes.
"You could ask her to coffee," Kadey said. Alexis agreed. Even thinking about it now, coffee is such a good first date. Public place, everyone likes drinking things, and they have a bathroom. I really can't think of anything better.

Finals came and went; I honestly don't remember them, it was so many years ago. And then came the final day of everything, and we were all being kicked out of the dorm. My clothes and books and piles of junk were stuffed into boxes and squished into my mom's van next to the conversation starter chair and my cylindrical pillows. I hugged Jack and Kadey and a couple of others and waved and said I'd see them when we moved into our house in August, and then my mom drove me to the Humanities building to pick up my French final.

I was planning to be out of the vehicle such a short time that I left the door open. Two minutes later I plopped back into the seat and dropped the stapled pages onto the floor. "Your phone rang while you were gone," my mom said. "I didn't answer it."
"Oh," I said when I saw that Brad had called. "I must have forgotten something. Wait a sec, we might have to go back to the dorm." Silly girl, I can say that now that I look back on it. I held my hand out toward her, letting it over in the air while I listened to the message.

"Hey, Genevieve, it's Brad. Um, I just wanted to talk to you, and yeah, call me back." It was very short. I couldn't figure out why he had called, so I pushed the call button, found his name, and soon it was connecting. Beep. Beep. Beee-

"Hi."
"Hey," I said. "Did I forget something in my room?"
"Oh, uh, no. I actually... well... I was wondering, now that I'm not your RA, if you would wanna go out to coffee sometime?" I couldn't help it, one of my hands clapped itself to my mouth and wouldn't move. I smiled, hugely, and at first forgot I was supposed to say something. This boy really didn't lose any time.
"I...sure," I said, remembering a conversation I'd had with Lilie a few months before about just giving guys at least a first date, it took them so much courage sometimes to just ask. We kind of felt like we owed it to them for being so brave. Or stupid. "Yeah, that'd be cool."

"OK, awesome," he said. I could hear him smiling. "So...how about next Monday? I can drive down to you."
"Cool. Sure, that'd work fine. See you then." He said goodbye and hung up, and I snapped my phone shut and looked at my mom. She wasn't looking at me. "I'm going to coffee with Brad on Monday," I said.
"Brad-the-RA Brad?"
"Yup."
"Really."
"Yup."
"You like him?"
"Uh... I'll figure it out later?" I laughed, feeling a little giddy. I couldn't stop smiling. Suddenly I really did like him, and it was amusing that he had waited maybe two minutes after un-becoming my RA before asking me out. That was worth something, right?



*Names changed, of course. It's more fun that way.

Now

Now that it has been decided that I'm not getting honors, I'm finding it more than difficult to actually sit down and finish my paper. I just rewrote a few introductory paragraphs, one for each of my four-ish sections, and now...oh, now. Now I need to just finish the lot.

It's funny, a week and a half ago, I was in terrifying freak-out mode. I was scaring my friends and family, I'm pretty sure. I couldn't be awake without spending almost every moment thinking about my paper, and what I had left to do, and how much time a day I had to spend on it to keep the world from combusting. And now... It's like in the Bible, when people were kept from seeing things, and suddenly they were allowed to see and understand them, and it says, "And the scales fell from his/her eyes..."

I seem to have lost my scales, but I don't know that I'm going to go looking for them. I'm having quite the difficulty remembering a time when I really enjoyed writing my thesis. I love research (I'm good at it) and I love writing (again, small, albeit subjective, talent). But it seems that writing in English and writing in French have only the use of words in common. I should have known that. It was always so frustrating in France trying to explain things. Simple things like the story of my life, to complicated things about my emotions, were blown so completely and amazingly out of proportion that they became indistinguishable from near insanity.

So I should have known that French was going to kick my... butt. And I suppose God did try to tell me. It was hard enough convincing Elise to be my thesis adviser and to let me do credits over the summer. I can't even begin to explain the other hoops I had to jump through to find a committee. It was stressful even from Day One. And now... less immediate stress, I guess. I find myself hovering above a creepy pool of dampened emotions. I know they're there. They always are, no matter how much I try to ignore them.

I don't care to know exactly what is in the pool, but I have a feeling that if something else not-so-happy happens, I'm going to splash right in and be forced to find out how deep it really is. That's the now. The later, well, I'll worry about that later. Rather, I'll not worry about it later, because I'm tired of worrying. I'm tired of pushing myself to my limits. Just because Michaux did it (the subject of my thesis), doesn't mean I have to. I used to think that at least creatively, I was a little like him. He pushed himself, he wrote strange things that only a few truly loved. But he was trying to break himself up, pouring fragments of himself into an abyss that he imagined was in his mind.

Now I know better.
Why did I enjoy this past summer and all the work I did? I was spending 2 to 4 hours every morning after my run writing a story about a girl named Aralie who saves a dying magical forest.

Michulie-a

I went to see Julie&Julia a couple of days ago for a friend's birthday. It was the perfect adorable chick flick, and the worst decision I could have made at that moment.

You see, I am Julie. Er...and Julia. I am Michulie-a.

Seeing images of Paris brought back this terrible nostalgic feeling, like I had finally figured out how to teleport, but could only move the upper half of my body. My mind was in Paris, my feet were on a popcorn-encrusted floor in Colorado. And then there was Julie's story, about writing novels and never finishing them, about wanting to write and be read and actually getting published in the end. And watching that was like someone had read my diaries, done a little bit of creative work (I am, after all, so definitely not married), and set it up on the big screen.

I'm mad at myself for not having kept up with this blog all summer. I've been writing my thesis and working on some fiction stories I really am going to try to get published; not sure yet if I'll self publish or if I'll play the game with an agent. I want to do some more research, first. But with my last semester starting pretty soon...and with no more internship to talk about, I'm going to have to change my blog subject again. Maybe something more permanent?

Who knows? Does it even matter? Anyone reading that cares?

....thought so.

p.s. I have come to the devastating conclusion that I am one of the most depressing people I know. Dang sarcastic pessimism. It's like an awkward birthmark, no joke.