Reflections on First Meetings

Well hello there, folks. This is Claire, again. I'm sneaking in to tell my side of the story. I guess it won't be as detailed as what my boyfriend writes, but there are a few things I want to explain. Of course, there are a few things I won't explain, like the bracelet I gave him. For one thing, I can't explain it to you, our unseen readers, without giving it away to him... and it's much more fun to watch him figure it out.

So let me start with how we met. There I was, working as a pharmacy tech, and one of my cow-orkers (I know I misspelled that, but this was the sort of guy who probably does go around orking cows in his spare time) was talking to me about how wonderful it is to have Jesus in your life. I'd tried to explain about being Catholic - you know, the church that traces its lineage all the way back to the Apostle Peter, "upon this rock will I build my church" Peter? - but it just didn't seem to compute. I might as well have been telling him I worshiped garden slugs.

Anyway, he'd been talking, and I'd been nodding along and thinking about my grocery list, and then all of sudden there was this very faint line of purple... something. Like a smear in the air kind of something. And it smears up to the cow-orker's mouth, and then all of sudden he doubles over and throws up everywhere. I could have avoided that, but I would have had to move a lot faster than I like to.

And then the pharmacist comes back into the room, and makes this crack about how God must not like people talking about him like that. Except I can still see the smear, and it kind of goes back to him. So he's done something to the cow-orker, something not very pleasant. And since I carry the blood of snakes in my veins, there's a good chance that this was a message directed at me...

...But nothing comes of it. He doesn't say anything to me, really. He doesn't do anything else. He doesn't act like I'm anything but a normal girl who works in his pharmacy.

So I did what anyone would do: I asked my friends and family about it. What was he doing? How should I respond? What should I do next? And they said, basically, that since he was pretending I was ordinary, I should keep pretending I was ordinary... but I should try to get closer to him and find out what was going on.

So I did. I asked him out for coffee. Just like someone who wasn't part snake. And he acted like nothing had happened, and like I was just someone who wasn't part snake. And I had a really good time. And after a few dates, I found myself thinking, You know, maybe he doesn't want to talk about what he is or what he knows about me, but he doesn't care that I'm different. When you've grown up knowing that there was part of yourself - a big part, an important part, a central, fundamental, primal part - that you have to keep hidden... well, you'd be amazed how important it was to find someone who knew but didn't care like that.

Reflections of a Deranged Cultist is Fiction, folks. Seriously, nothing to see here.