A recent realization that bites

Right. Confession time.

It's a little shocking, this whole thing. I've finally realized that a lot of my "emotion" is fake. I don't really feel half as much as I think I do. I can't handle a relationship because I don't feel enough. I don't care to be around him. I don't care whether he's there or not. I have no desire to kiss him, hold his hand, even talk to him.

See, I have this modus operandi.

Step One: I like unattainable men. Damaged, mysterious, unattainable. Any combination will do.

Step Two: I chase. Oh, I love the chase. It makes me feel like a woman. I fawn. I blush. I write poetry. I cry. Everyone, myself included, thinks I'm either head over heels or totally insane.

Step Three: The unattainable becomes interested, or otherwise attainable.

Step Four: I lose interest instantly and walk in the other direction at a brisk clip.

It's happened so many times I've lost count. I know why I'm so detached and distant, and it's a natural reaction, all things considered. But everybody has hurdles in life. I apparently tripped on the first one and am still lying on the ground waiting to be pulled up. But you know, it doesn't work that way. If I can't pick myself up, nobody will.

So there we go. This is my plan for the future, as of this realization - have friends, go without sex all my life (shut up, it can be done), have children via artificial insemination, and chase unattainable men by way of recreation.

Talk done.

Family ties

What is family? Is your father the man you grow up with who nurtures you and loves you and teaches you to walk and talk and tie your shoes? Or is your father the stranger who donated half your genes and then disappeared? These are questions I'm planning to explore - and perhaps answer - in this story...

Devon Marsden is nineteen. Her mother Deirdre has just died. Devon wants to find the father she has never met. All she has is an old picture and a last name. The search takes her across the Atlantic and to the Isle of Skye off the coast of Scotland, where she arrives at the door of a secluded mansion. The man who answers has black hair, blue eyes and a lilting accent. He's the handsome, wealthy, intelligent, arrogant (and Irish) Declan Moriarty, and he has no idea who she is. The conversation goes to the effect of the following:

Devon: Don't you remember? Her name was Deirdre Marsden. It was twenty years ago.
Declan: Please. Do you have any idea how many women I slept with twenty years ago? What month?
Devon: I was born in October, so...January.
Declan: Hmm. When in October?
Devon: Twenty-second.
Declan: So...mid-January. (pause) Got a picture?

When he sees her picture, however, he agrees that he probably is in fact her father. She explains that her mother's dead and that he's her only surviving relative.

Declan isn't what she's been expecting, and Devon soon realizes that he's nothing like any of the possibilities she's imagined. He's not a criminal or a drunk or a wife-beater, not sleazy or a lowlife. He's also not a warm, caring man with a wife and a bucket of kids.

Declan is an enigma. He drinks only whiskey, rolls his own cigarettes (with licorice-flavoured paper) and used to be so careless with women that he now lives in the relative isolation of the mansion and has been under a sort of self-imposed celibacy for the past year. Devon is also probably not his only child. His moral compass is decidedly askew. He's suave, charming, almost dangerously charismatic, and she doesn't see him as a father. She understands why her mother fell for him - and she begins to do the same.

Declan understands that there is a difference between an addiction and a problem. Tobacco, alcohol, coffee, the harmonica, painting - they're all addictions of varying degrees, but they're not problems because his desire for them doesn't negatively affect the quality of his life. Women, however, have always been a problem...hence the reason he lives where and how he does. He's messed up the lives of so many women that he came to the island to be away from it all, and now he's messing up his daughter's life as well. Devon tries to keep her distance, Declan contemplates suicide...

This is not a happy story. But it's not going to have a traditional ending - they're not going to realize it was just distorted familial affection and have a normal father-daughter relationship happily ever after. Oh no. It's all or nothing for these two.

"Declan."
"What?"
"Never mind."
"Your tongue must have bite marks from all the things you never say."

Eulogy

I’m here to tell you a story. Not about my father, but about a woman. The world took no notice when she died, not like it has now that he’s gone. She died in a hospital not far from here, four years ago, on a cold day in April.

In case you’re wondering what relevance this has to my father, let me explain. I had to tell her story today. I promised him. And even if I hadn’t, I would have had to tell it anyway, because of something my father always used to say to her.

“The only stories in my life worth telling are the ones that begin with you.”

My father didn’t die yesterday. He didn’t die of the lung cancer that had been eating him alive without his knowledge or permission. He died four years ago on that day in April when the woman that meant everything to him closed her eyes forever.

That woman was my mother.

She had an unusual name. That’s actually how they met. He was taking auditions for a role in a movie that was his first attempt at directing. It was a movie that would win him three Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe. Anyway, he was reading through the list of names, and she was next. Everyone else had been called by their full name, first and last, but he wasn’t sure whether he could pronounce hers. So he said, “Miss Scott.”

She stood up. She was tall and dark-haired and had brown eyes. Brown was always my father’s favourite eye colour. But there was something else about her. A quiet strength, maybe. It was something none of us were never able to isolate and identify. She was like that. You could never categorize her, never put her in a box or just tick the qualities that she possessed. She always had something more, something extra, something indefinable and beautiful that seemed beyond our comprehension.

And then she said her name. Leilani. My father would later say it was the most beautiful name he had ever heard, even after he found out that it was Hawaiian for ‘heavenly flowers’, which was a little too sentimental for anyone’s taste. He would also say that that was the moment he knew she was the one.

My mother didn’t get the part, although not for lack of interest from my father. His producers overruled him, said they wanted someone with star power. When she left the auditions that day, he didn’t know whether he would ever see her again. But my father had never been the kind of man to wait on Fate to work her magic. He decided to be proactive. He called her up the next day, asked her if she wanted to have coffee with him at a small café on 14th Street. She said yes.

When he walked in, she was already there. They talked for hours, about music and philosophy, about art and religion, about politics and money. The owner of the café finally had to boot them out at nine o’clock in the night, half an hour past closing. He walked her home. According to both my parents, they never ran out of things to say to each other. And as far as I know, they didn’t run out of things to say even after fifteen years of marriage.

They started dating in the fall of 1986. She was nineteen years old, a struggling actress and writer who was putting herself through college on a barista’s salary. He was forty-three, an accomplished actor with several critically acclaimed roles under his belt. Nobody had the faintest inkling that it would work. Nobody dreamed that she would marry him, have children for him and stay with him until she died. Nobody dreamed that he would be true to her even after her death from complications of pneumonia in 2004.

My father married my mother in the spring of 1987. There was no doubt in his mind as to whether he was doing the right thing. She was everything to him, and it was as simple as that. They loved each other. In fact, they redefined love. Love was the ultimate surrender. It was giving yourself wholly and completely to someone else without fear or reservation, and having that person accept you without question. And that’s what my parents did.

I was born in the winter of 1988, in the same hospital where my mother would later die. They named me together, they brought me home together, they raised me and nurtured me and loved me together. And when my brother Daniel was born two years later, they were more than happy to repeat the process.

My mother was a beautiful woman. It’s easy to see why someone would have loved her. But it was more than that. My father says she had a wisdom in her eyes that was beyond her years, that she saw the world in a way nobody else did, that she saw things not as they were but as they could be. Beauty where there was ugliness.

She changed him. Being with her made him feel immortal. He felt like he could write sonnets to a leaf blowing in the wind, or epics on a dewdrop frozen on a single blade of grass. Everything around him inspired him.

When I was twelve, my father decided that he wanted to write, direct and star in a movie. He’d never written a screenplay before, but he also never walked away from a challenge. And so for hours and hours he and my mother sat together at the computer. I was still a child then, but I saw the way they looked at each other and I hoped that, one day, someone would look at me with that much love in their eyes.

The screenplay took six months to finish. I remember the day, the exact moment. It was January 17th, 2003, and I was ploughing headlong through the second Harry Potter novel. My brother, next to me on the floor in our reading corner of the living room, was on the first. We were both wondering if our father would ever finish this screenplay. When you’re a child, six months seems like an awful long time to be working on one thing.

When he opened the door, though, I knew this was it. I knew it was finally finished. The joy on his face was incredible to watch; the cool, calm collectedness of my father had all but vanished. My mother stood next to him, one arm around his neck.

“Yes,” she said in answer to the unspoken question in our faces. “He’s finished.”

I’ll never forget the way she said ‘he’s finished’. Not ‘we’, even though she spent almost as many hours on it as he did, and surely had been his muse. He.

They didn’t let us read it. They did one better than that. They performed it, a little impromptu play of sorts, right there in our living room. The easy chemistry between them was beautiful. And she was a good actor. Better than good. She was great.

The movie, however, was never made, because later that year my sister Serena was born, something that nobody had expected, least of all my parents. My father was fifty-six, and now he had a newborn daughter. So the screenplay took a backseat as they set to work bringing up this new arrival with the same care and attention which they had shown to my brother and I.

In February of 2004, my mother contracted a chest infection. It got so bad she had to go to the hospital. They gave her antibiotics, antivirals, steroids. Nothing seemed to work. The doctors knew what was wrong with her, they just didn’t know how to make it right.

It was hard, watching as our beautiful, vibrant mother faded away before our eyes. My brother’s grades slipped, and I dropped out of school entirely so I could spend time with her in the hospital. My father had suddenly found himself with a dying wife, two troubled children and a baby that he was going to have to raise alone. My mother would not be there to share Serena’s first steps or her first word. It was an unthinkable situation.

We were all around her when she breathed her last breath. It was the 3rd of April, 2004, and it was cold outside. But that did not stop my father from a solitary walk through the hospital grounds without a coat. Perhaps part of him wanted to get pneumonia as well, and to die, because life would not be worth living if she were not there.

As it turns out, he didn’t get pneumonia, and he didn’t die. He realized that while my mother was gone, she had left him three children. So he sent me back to school. He tutored my brother until Daniel was getting straight A’s again. And he raised Serena singlehandedly. My father had always been a good man. But I think that after my mother died, he became a truly great man. He always put us before himself. He was never short-tempered or curt, but infinitely patient and understanding. We had been blessed with not one but two perfect parents, and now that my mother was gone, we still had my father.

He was diagnosed with lung cancer in the spring of 2007. It was too late for treatment, and he didn’t try to postpone the inevitable. What he did do was turn the story of their love into a book. He wrote it, and from his deathbed he oversaw the editing, the format and the overall presentation of the memoir. He had specific ideas and nobody dared cross him. This was a thing in which he would not yield.

Unfortunately, my father could not be with us today as the book is launched worldwide. He had other commitments. If only death could have waited one more day...

But death does not wait. It did not wait on my mother, nor my father. And at any rate, he would not have wanted to be here. I have been entrusted with the care of my brother and my sister, and while it sounds like a heavy burden, it is not too much to ask. For I learned how to be a mother from the best. Wherever my father is, he knows that I can handle this. He knows I understand why he didn’t undergo agonizing chemotherapy, the loss of his hair, the bleeding gums, the infections.

The truth of it is that he wanted to be with my mother. No man wants to die, but my father didn’t fight death. Because he knew with absolute certainty - as I do - that wherever he is, my mother is also. There isn’t anything else for it. My parents’ love defies death. My father didn’t promise to be with my mother until the end of her life, but to the end of his. My mother didn’t say she’d love my father until he died, but until she did.

Dad, I understand. We all do. Give Mom our love. Tell her how handsome Daniel looked on my arm at the prom, how beautiful Serena’s growing up to be. And tell her how I love her. How I’ll never forget her.

I love you. Both of you.

Reunion

The girl in the café had been stretching her latte for the last fifteen minutes. Wearing just jeans, a T-shirt and a light jacket, she wasn’t dressed warmly enough for the winter cold, and the way she wrapped her hands around the tepid cup showed she felt the chill, even indoors. The look on her face was a lost one, and none of the people getting on with their lives around her seemed to notice or care.

I noticed, though, and I cared. There was nothing outwardly special about her; of average height and average build, brown-haired and brown-eyed, she was no different from any of a hundred girls I’d already seen for the day. But her sadness was singular. It permeated the air around her, drenching her in a sorrow that seemed to weigh more heavily upon her than any sorrow had ever weighed upon anyone I had ever seen. This was no teenager’s angst, no divorcee’s distress. This was surely the sort of melancholy of which Keats had written.

I watched as she listlessly stirred the last few drops of coffee that remained in the cup, and then drained them. She brushed a stray lock of hair behind one ear, and resumed her empty stare out the frosty window.

My attention was diverted momentarily by the faint click of the door, and I turned my head to see a man whose face had obviously been ravaged by a grief as great as this girl’s. He was older, perhaps in his forties or fifties, with greying dark hair and deep lines carved into his face. He was haggard and worn, as if he had fallen too hard and come too far, and inwardly I winced in sympathy for them both.

But then a truly extraordinary thing happened. By some miracle of fate, perhaps, the girl turned her lonely eyes from the window, and they locked onto the stranger at the door with a fierceness and an intensity that shocked me. Her eyes flashed with what might have been anything in the world, and her lips parted as though she were lost for words that desperately needed to be said.

The man, for his part, returned her stare with every iota of barely restrained emotion. He didn’t move, and his face didn’t change, but his dark, haunted eyes burned. I could hardly look at him. Every moment seemed an eternity, like looking into those pools of anguish was a burden too great to bear.

The girl stood, and now her expression was completely different. I read fear and pain and endless longing, but great waves of relief were also washing over her face. Her lips trembled, and she began to move with what seemed frustrating slowness towards him.

I found I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I had nothing to do with any of this, but there was a deep ache in my chest from just watching this incredible thing about to happen.

The girl was walking normally now, halfway across the café. I waited with bated breath. One solitary tear glistened on her cheek, and the setting sun fired it as red as blood. She broke into a run, and the man took a single step forward to meet her as she hurled herself into his arms.

How those two held each other I may never be able to describe. Limbs intertwined, their bodies pressed so tightly it seemed the two merged into one. And whether the tears they shed were of joy or sorrow, I doubt either could have said.

I thought they would never part, and in truth, I didn’t want them to. I was perfectly content to stay enraptured in the sudden and surprising warmth that seemed to spread from the spot where they stood embracing. In all the English language there is only one word to describe what I know they felt. Relief and happiness are good words, but they are overshadowed sadly by the simple and succinct word ‘love’. And their love was so great it enveloped not just the room, not just the café, not just that suburb of London, but the whole world.

And I was watching when they kissed, the kiss to shame all kisses that I shall not even attempt to depict. When they finally separated, they stood there for a moment, just gazing at each other, each basking in the glow of the other’s presence and all-encompassing love, and then she took his hand and gently led him back to the table where she had been sitting. And they turned their chairs at right angles to each other, and just sat there without saying a word.

When the words finally came they were slow and halting, and so soft I could not hear them. But how could words matter after what had just been shared? Silence fell often between them and did not bother them, and I could only sit there with a smile on my face. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they only looked, and while he was almost old and she was almost ordinary, the way they looked at each other was enough to make everyone else uncomfortable, because it was so obvious that she was the only person in the room for him, and he the only thing she saw.

I don’t know what circumstances brought those two together, nor what may have driven them apart, but I do know this: no matter what it was that tore them asunder, it could never have been as strong at that which holds them together still. For this is the tenth year, and they are still as one. Each year on the anniversary of that astonishing reunion, the memory of which still makes me smile, they come to this old café together and sip their lattes and sit in seldom broken silence. Sometimes they speak, and sometimes they don’t, but always there is the look. He is greyer and more lined and she is only thirty, and often people stare and criticize where they have no right, but I think the two little ones with them speak volumes for the sheer consuming power of pure, enduring love.

So...

So the Firefly fanfic (wow, I just typed that as Firefy fanflic, which takes Nathan Fillion's "Firefy flan" to a yet another level) is finished at four pages. It also has a truly horrifying name - What You Expect And What You Need. Yes, the naming fairy deserted me in my hour of need. I do apologize.

I put it up on FF.net just for the sake of doing something with it. I'm a bit restless lately, and I can't say I'm really feeling to leave my writing lying around gathering virtual dust on my harddrive. So if you're feeling bored, go to http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3413858/1/ and have a bit of a read. Just don't click that link if you find homosexuality in any way offensive. (For the initiated - yes, it's slash.)

Started another one a little while ago, and have finished the first chapter of it so far. It could stand on its own or be a sort of sequel to What You Expect. I just hope I won't run out of steam before it's done. And yes, it's very likely that it will be slashy as well.

And in case anyone's been having doubts: I'm bisexual. No, not really even bisexual. Omnisexual. Genderqueer. Whatever. I don't see the need of a label to define me, nor do I see the need for gender to figure into my romantic relationships. So there.

And just to clarify as I trot off to sleep - Joss Whedon is a god. No, not a god. The god. I admire this man to the point of sheer idol-worship. Not only does he not mind fanfiction about his creations, but he encourages it. Not only does he not mind slash, but hell, he incorporates it into his shows. For example...

Spike: Angel and me were never intimate. Except that one -

Yes? Except that one what? Indeed.

"They couldn't take the sky from them, our big damn heroes made a film..."

Crush

Well, here we have it. My latest celebrity crush - Nathan Fillion, best known as Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Mal) in the most amazing series to be cancelled ever, Firefly, and the subsequent movie Serenity. Just as an aside, is there anything Joss Whedon can't do?

So yes, Nathan. The important stats: he's Canadian, thirty-five, and six foot one. Supposedly single, although I can't figure out how. What girl could not want a guy who looks like this? And not only is he gorgeous, but he seems both witty and very down to earth in interviews. I'd love to meet him for platonic reasons alone. This is one guy who'd make an excellent liming partner.

Nathan can be seen in Sundance favourite Waitress.

And just so we're clear, I've started an as-yet-untitled Firefly fanfic. And in a couple weeks I'll be the proud owner of the single season of Firefly and the movie Serenity. Yep, I've become a fangirl. But there's no shame in going all fangirly over good stuff!

Big damn heroes.

Big damn movie.

Nuff said.

Dream

What would you get if you threw Gabriel Byrne, Scotland, lobsters, muppets, Samuel L. Jackson and the Oscars into a giant blender? Well, you'd get this dream.

It starts with Gabriel Byrne coming home by me and my godmother limping up the stairs on ill-fitting transplanted feet. She'd apparently cut off hers as a sacrifice (he was the devil). He comes up the stairs in full navy blue suit, waistcoat, everything, then does an Irish jig in the kitchen and proceeds to extol the virtues of recycling while my mother and I argue about which one of us he wants.

Cut to: me, Gabriel and a load of people in wetsuits watching lobsters off the coast of Scotland in outrageously warm water while our guide complains that it's been a horribly cold summer. Meanwhile, the lobsters turn out to be muppets and burst into song. Gabriel, who is now miraculously in trunks, pulls me out of the water and onto some semi-island where we get splashed in the face by the mother of all waves and stare awkwardly at our soggy pizzas while incubating sexual tension.

Cut to: concert, with Gabriel and I just offstage washing dishes and tossing them across the stage to someone offstage on the other side. Onstage, Mario does his usual groove thang at a piano while Marc, plus a lot of badly cut black hair and minus the gimp, channels Stevie Wonder at another piano.

Cut to: gigantic epic indoor chase scene going on - and through an airport, it looks like. It coincides with a bunch of other movies as we pelt along (somebody's holding a gun to Bruce Willis' head, there's a shootout between Benicio del Toro and Michael Douglas, a bunch of badly dressed teenagers including a much younger Leonardo di Caprio and I think Shane West as well are cussing out some airport security).

I'm apparently Kevin Spacey in glasses, chasing Samuel L. Jackson (who is snarking about my glasses) to see who gets to host the Oscars. So I catch up to him on a set of narrow spiral stairs and trip him. As I'm opening the door, he asks, from the floor, "So what are you wearing?" As I turn to tell him I was thinking Armani, he goes, "No, fucko! You're wearing glasses!", kicks me in the face, laughs like a maniac, and gets through the door first.

But apparently this is like an RPG, because I can continue from my most recently saved point, and fortunately I remembered to save when we reached the stairs. This time I know that he's going to kick me so I grab his legs but I go headfirst down the stairs anyway. So on my last try, when he asks me what I'm wearing, I turn, say, "Glasses, fucko!", kick him in the face and run through the door laughing.

What the fuck? Anyone?