Ancilla: SOUNDBITE EDITION. (SERIALIZED, MATURE SECTIONS MARKED)

Chesed (PART 1, has 2276 words)

"Are you sure you don't want me to order you some bacon and eggs, or something? You look like you're starving."

"No thanks."

We were lovers, once. Now we are former lovers, trying to be "just friends." It's easy enough to manage when one was not much more than a friend in the first place. Trying to bury the memory of passion and pretend that it doesn't matter that there was once romance and now there is no more, is another matter. At least for us, it is.

We're still trying anyway, because as awkward as being "just friends" has proven to be, the thought of being enemies or, worse, ghosts of memories to each other is more painful.

"I don't think you get to be angry at me for having dumped you for a man, after this." My ex-girlfriend stabs at a pancake with her fork. I must still love her, at least a little. Ordinarily I wouldn't even consider meeting a person for breakfast before a civilized hour - say, eleven o'clock. The only way I can even think of being awake at dawn involves an unhealthy amount of caffeine. It's a good thing the diner has bottomless cups of coffee.

Those pancakes she's eating look delicious. Oh, well.

"That was different. I was dating you at the time. We moved in together. I thought we were in love with each other. I thought you loved me."

"I did love you. I still kind of do. Just not..."

"Not enough?" I grimace. "You left me hanging for rent."

"Get a roommate."

"Easier said than done. This is me, remember? I have to keep the roommate after I get the roommate, assuming I actually do manage to get the roommate." It's been months, and not one person has followed up on my campus posters yet, so the point is moot. I suppose I'd have better luck if I paid for a classified ad in the newspaper, but I can't afford to do that. Working for the local newspaper as a telemarketer gives me a steady supply of free newspapers. It doesn't give me free classified advertisements.

"You yelled at me because you said I treated my relationship with my boyfriend as more real than the relationship I had with you. You used to tell me that back when you actually had friends, your friends would leave you hanging when they got into romantic relationships, only to get friendly again when things didn't work out with their boyfriends, and they were single again. The last time you contacted me to hang out was last March."

I hang my head. She's right. As it turned out, we were more compatible as friends than we were as girlfriends, anyway, for all that we had managed at some point to convince each other that we loved each other; and nursing resentment isn't exactly the best way to keep a friendship alive, any more than ignoring your friend is. But I've done one of the things I used to rail against: I've ignored people I call friends entirely and let myself get drunk on being in love.

It's a great way to lose friends.

And it's not like Magister wants me to do it. Every now and then, he asks me if maybe I'm neglecting the other people in my life, since he never hears me talking about them or sees me with them. I blow him off every time he asks because I never really know quite how I should respond, but it's a reasonable question.

"I'm sorry," I say, looking up from the cup of coffee I've been toying with. I think it's my fourth, but it might be my fifth. She wanted to buy me breakfast, too, but coffee is about as much charity as I'm willing to accept from most people.