nervousRight now, I'm struggling. I daily struggle with instincts, bonds, hormones, directives from deities, professionalism, friendship, love, psychology, magic and/or psionics, personal history, friendship, water brotherhood, sleep deprivation, and ghosts. Breakfast every day is an insane cocktail of all of the above plus more blended together and served up on the rocks spiked with Everclear and pure caffeine. No wonder I'm losing weight.
The universe has gone mad, and I have gone mad with it. I am trying to juggle two complementary bonds with people who are too much like each other to exist in the same sane universe. I am trying to reconcile the fact that I love two different men with the fact that one of them is monogamous by wiring, and the other one is monogamous by law. I am spitting mad over the fact that I have a man who I love, a man who loves me in return, directly to hand, and I may not touch him; I am spitting mad over the fact that I love a man beyond all reason and to the ends of the universe, and this man thinks himself not kind enough, not patient enough, not tolerant enough, not caring enough, to be worthy of my love; I am spitting mad over the fact that someone I love beyond all reason thinks that he loses anything he loves, and he fears losing me so much that he fears to love me lest he lose me.
I have been handed the memo that tells me that if I proceed any further along a certain path, I do so at the certain peril of myself and my two closest bondmates. I have ignored several previous memos; if I should ignore this one, I will surely place the three of us in mortal danger. That, I cannot do, yet I fear I have already done so. If I neglect my bond with Darkside for my bond with Figment, the bond with Darkside will snap. Should the bond with Darkside snap, he and I are both imperiled, he more so than I. I have a safety net. I have other bonds. He has no other bondmates who would cushion the mindlash and bandage up the spill of heart's blood. If I survived, I'd go more than slightly mad, and drag Figment with me. Grilled doom on toast would be served all around.
The scariest form of suicide is slow and intentional self-neglect, or an "accident" that only a few know is anything but. Evil twins know all of each other's tricks, though, and know when to cry "Bullshit!" on an utterly spurious claim of "I'm OK. No, really. I'm fine." The urge to disappear gently off the face of the planet can strike subtly enough in me so that only an evil twin can look into my eyes and see that I'm not really looking out of them anymore. That's when the big guns get called in, and I get dragged off by my evil twin on a sleepover that's really a suicide watch. I'd do the same for him, and he knows it. Usually, if the mood strikes me, sleep will reset me, but he wasn't willing to chance his evil twin alone in that mood.
That's what I've been juggling. There's more, of course. There's always more. But that alone is sufficient to warp my universe...
So, of course, it must be fixed. Bonds, duct tape, e-mail, phone calls, priority-juggling, more bonds, clergy calls, pledges, blessings, coffee, codes, plotting, psychology, and love everlasting. All our cunning plans would be for naught but for love.
My bondmates need to meet each other. Dawn points out that Figment and Darkside need to become friends. Figment is plotting the setting me up with Darkside, but since Figment doesn't know Darkside yet, Figment is likely to suggest plans of action that would utterly screw things up. So Figment must first get to be friends with Darkside, and know Darkside inside and out as I do, and then he will be able to plot cunning plots with me.
