A shy reference librarian, and a college student who was disowned when she refused to submit to conversion therapy, meet in a bookstore. He's been waiting his whole life for her. Meanwhile, she's starting her whole life over. What ensues between the...
By the time spring arrived, my headaches were finally under control. The campus doctor had found an old-school, "non-preferred" ergot-derived medication that, if taken daily, seemed to be an effective form of migraine prevention for me, although there were still a few days when I could not stave off the dizziness and roar of oncoming pain in my head, and on those days I resorted to hitting a bottle of strong narcotics that he had finally broken down and prescribed for me. I wondered why it took him so long to prescribe them. Was he afraid I would grow addicted? If so, it was just as well that he didn't know about the shopping bag full of "flower arrangement" poppies that I bought at the craft store in the nearest mall, and how they made a halfway palatable tea if I added enough honey to feed a hungry bear, and which I only drank if I was starting to hallucinate from pain or if I was on the verge of vomiting from it.
I started to force myself to do more therapeutic stretching and range-of-motion exercises to limber up my too-taut shoulders. I found the exercises in the campus library, in a book on sports medicine. I wished I'd been doing them earlier. I also started getting more mindful of other ways to loosen up the scar tissue to avoid being stuck with constricted arm movement for the rest of my life. My motion was already constricted, of course, but I didn't want to risk it getting worse. Several times a day, I would massage camphor and menthol ointment into the tissue, hard enough that I had to grit my teeth when I did it. The scar tissue felt little or no pain; the muscles underneath it were another matter. It would have been even better had I a friend or a lover to do the massaging for me, or failing that, a heavy flogger to use to massage my muscles, but all I had then was myself, and the only flogger I had was the one that had created the scar tissue in the first place, which would have done me little good.
The chest pains and chills never went away. They were easier to endure when I wasn't constantly fighting migraines, though, so eventually I got used to them.
I continued to do well in my classes without actually expending any effort to do so. Part of me was relieved, while the other part was disappointed. I was used to more intellectual challenge; I had grown spoiled under Erastes when he was my Magister. Hopefully, the upcoming year would provide a little more opportunity to test my worth. On a wall bulletin board in the building that housed the English department, I'd seen an advertisement for a study abroad opportunity at an institute in Oxford for the study of medieval and Renaissance humanities, and upon finding out that my financial aid package could be used for study abroad, I had sent in an application. My year abroad would begin in August.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
It was around the time of my twenty-sixth birthday that I made the decision that I was ready to rejoin the human race.
