She thought she just had a type. Not a physical-type but a personality-type. Aloof but impulsive. Free-spirited on the surface but deeply-guarded on the inside. She always wanted to save people like that, wanted to mold them into genuine free-spirits, not just faking it. Always musicians and mostly guitarists. Didn’t need to be good guitarists. The kind of poseur noodling acoustic covers of Dave Matthews songs at parties for attention was more than enough. She knew it wasn’t what she needed. She knew that it was wrong but that’s what she wanted so she kept on chasing them.
Physically, they varied. Tall, short, all kinds of ethnicities. Redheads, brown hair. Golden hair. A few women mixed in with the men. She was in her thirties with eight significant relationships to her name, but while they differed on their outsides, they were that same toxic type deep down. She joked she kept dating the same person.
And she had been. She was dating the same shapeshifter over and over. As previously mentioned, she joked about that occasionally, but had no conscious belief that it was anything other than jest. You’d have to be crazy to believe Steven, William, Jared, Stacie, Jamal, Other Steven, Emily and Philip were all one person. She probably was crazy, of course, banging one’s cranium against the wall of the same sort of lovers over and over is a kind of madness. Maybe not a ‘disorder’ with a specific name in the DSM-5 but insane, nonetheless. Maybe all love is crazy but it’s real anyway. So too for her not-joke jokes. Just because she’s crazy doesn’t mean the world isn’t crazy as well.
One night, she went to bed with Philip, having been serenaded by “Crash” or some other pablum. Don’t judge. But partway toward twilight, she heard that lover thrashing from his nightmares and turned towards him, only to find First Steven moaning in his place. Still wearing Phil’s socks, not a scrap else. Same as he’d laid to rest. Between his veil of slumbers and her quite-understandable shock, there was a pause before either said anything. Phil/Steven/Steven tried joking his way out.
“This probably,” he stammered, “counts as a three-way.”
He admitted it was creepy to keep coming back as different people, but he just loved her so much he needed to make it work somehow. While she admitted it was strange to keep chasing the same exact type and, realistically, he could be anyone anywhere, also no court would believe that story.
Apart from the initial deception, everything else involved enthusiastic consent. The combination of magic and stupid they inhabited, they agreed, was more than shameful enough for them both.
After their parting, she still pursued that same personality, she couldn’t bear trying to change. All she learned was to wake up at night to see if they got taller or shorter when asleep. Maybe magic plus idiocy is love’s calculus. Maybe it’s far easier to change your body than who you are inside.
Loading comments...