Here’s an excerpt from the memoir I’m working on… enjoy!
What do you do when a man you’ve once hooked up with texts you: “I saw a movie with fairies in it and I thought of you ;)”?
If you’re me, the self proclaimed Queen of all things Faerie, you melt (even if he’d spelled it wrong – ae not ai but, semantics). I was at work when I received the text, and I blinked at it, uncomprehending. Kael. I hadn’t thought of him, really, in months.
The first time we met I was drunk and stumbling down the concrete past the bars. My friend Barbie and I had gone out drinking together and we were tripping over our own feet and giggling; I’d lean too far into her and she, with her diminutive size and me, with my Amazon height, nearly always ended up almost capsized in the road. Somehow, we managed to keep going. We were slurring secrets when we passed a bar I’d been to a few times to watch live music, and I heard someone say: “I like your corset.”
I blinked into the shadows and saw a man sitting on the patio, a lopsided grin on his boyishly charming face. He had shaggy hair and tattoos and light eyes, and I went, ooooh, is this my next victim? I struck a bit of a pose and warbled: “I like your tattoos.” We exchanged numbers, went on a date, hooked up and… nothing.
God that was over a year ago, probably. I’d been sober for about 8 months and even remembering that meeting made me cringe. Sometimes I did miss how easy alcohol made it for me to meet people but then I remembered how absolutely fucking crazy I was when I drank – blacking out, accepting rides from strangers, dark psychosis – and I’d decide that being a little quieter and awkward was just fine with me.
And here I was now, at the restaurant I’d worked at for a year and a half, with the new friends I’d made, staring down at my phone while my manager pretended not to see.
Why was I getting butterflies just reading this text? Was it the faeries warning me, winking at me, or something else? Faeries were known mischief makers but, they’d also been my guides for so long, ever since a dreaming young Liz had been introduced to their world.
I tapped out a quick reply, asking what movie it was and then tucked the phone back under the host stand. I didn’t know what this meant.
The wings wouldn’t stop flurrying around my stomach, like a snowstorm.
Elisabeth Writing 