Disclaimer: RENT belongs to Jonathan Larson. I'm just playing with the characters. ("Catch, Roger!")
Angel liked church. I never understood why, since the closest she ever came to saying a word about believing any of it was more like a belief in the collective unconscious. Sometimes I go to church now and I sit in the back and watch people. I try to see through Angel's eyes.
Visiting the church makes me feel worse. I walk home with my hands in my pockets, head bowed, stomping towards wherever 'home' happens to be at the moment. I always wonder if maybe, if I believed, I could feel some peace with her. All I feel is angry that I didn't get even a year with her.
Pain, of course. There is pain.
There's pain and anger and the fact that I'm such a fucking cliché! They make up this… this stages of death crap like it'll be easier because it makes sense, like you won't want to die and you won't hate your friends and you won't think these horrible things, like would she still be alive if.
Then it washes away. All that remains is a hollow shell, waiting for the memories to flood.
When I was eight years old, my parents took me upstate to a Renaissance Faire. That was great. There were fencing lessons, handicrafts, jousts and monkey's tails. Gypsy dancers spun and spun, dazzling my eyes with the gold-painted coins sewn onto their clothing. I won a painted ocarina in a literal rat race and watched a maypole dance.
The Renaissance Faire prepared me for high school by educating me on the many different, foreign words for sausages, like bangers and bratwurst. It's a lot less painful to be teased when you can out-tease yourself to your teasers. There's also a food called 'sin on a stick'. It's delicious.
In the gypsy camp at the Faire, I visited a fortune teller. Just for fun, right? But she held my palm and found my 'life line', and she looked at me, a wrinkled white woman with goopy black lines around her eyes, and touched my hand with her dry skin.
"I have never seen this before," she said, her eyes moving rapidly. "Your life line is broken in four places."
"What does that mean?" I asked.
She shook her head. "I do not know."
I had nightmares for years.
Later, I would attribute my habit of going for younger men to that. Fear of death seemed logical enough justification for a sexual relationship with someone "obscenely younger". It helped my parents accept me, though. Mom would invite over as many homosexual males as she knew who were around my age, even a little older. I never ducked below the age of consent. That was disgusting.
But sometimes my significant other of the moment would sit in on my classes. It's obscene how attractive I found that.
Hey, I'm a professor but I'm still human. I'm not a decrepit monkey skeleton. I like sex. I like kink.
Once, I made a mistake. It wasn't a mistake. I was supposed to call it a mistake, but I don't regret it. Could've ruined my life...
I had been teaching for a while. I had never done something quite so blatantly against the rules, but it never felt against the rules. A student sat in my class illuminated like a mote of dust, talking back with Roethke and Hughes and Whitman by heart. Some students don't belongs with other students. This one befriended faculty, would go out with us in groups on Fridays. Somestudents don't belong with other students, and students like that fit in easily with teachers.
It started as a more intimate friendship. We would walk together. We would talk. My romantic idealist laughed open-mouthed and clapped when laughing wasn't enough. This wasn't a child, but an adult who chose to be young and chose to be happy, not unlike Angel.
I wasn't infected then. And I wasn't careful. We figured, we had both had tests, both clean. A condom was enough.
We worried about disease, and we took what we considered adequeate precautions. That, in the end, was the mistake that wasn't a mistake, not the relationship with the student. Things happen to a person's body, during sex but also after.
Tired of thinking about Angel, tired of the senseless pain of missing her, I roll out of bed and stumble to the phone.
The condom broke. We were lucky. The problem wasn't disease.
"Hello?"
"Hey, baby."
"Thomas!"
"Mhm."
"How are you?"
"All right."
Not disease.
"So when are you coming to visit us?"
Not disease.
"How about this Saturday?"
Pregnancy.
To be continued!
Nice cliff-hanger, eh? It will be explained later why Collins was with a girl, this was just an introduction.
Review? Pretty please?