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I get it. He hates the Polloi. And I’m not saying that everything the Polloi does is good or right. But he can’t have it both ways. The first thing out of his mouth is that modern medicine is biased against omegas and then he says that everything the Polloi does is claptrap. What am I supposed to do, then? Where am I supposed to go?

“Coltrain says he’ll schedule a surgery to undo your tubes being tied if that’s what you want,” says Calix. “But you should also think about the fact that it’s not going to mean anything until you start menstruating again. You might as well wait. And, you know, anyway, are we sure we want to bring a child into this mess?”

I’m stung. “This isn’t a mess to me, Calix. This is…” My family. My life bond. The loves of my life.

He kisses me. He apologizes. He says he wants it for me, he wants me to have a baby, and he wants me to be happy.

I believe him.

But I remember that he said he was staying “for now.”

Am I going to lose Calix? I’m not sure if this is his forever, even if I am positive it’s mine.

arrow

IT’S BORING.

Ithink that’s the best way to describe it.

Calix is consumed with whatever he’s doing at Cedar Falls, and we still go in for tests and things, but not every day. At first, Lotus is really focused on nesting.

The two of them are busy, but Striker, Knight, and I are sort of adrift.

At first, it’s fine. We have a lot of television to catch up on, after all. We’ve been in danger, on the run, worried and frightened, for sometime. At first, we only have the energy for relaxation, because it’s exactly what we need to calm our nerves. At first, we simply settle into safety.

But after a while, it gets boring.

It sort of reminds me of my marriage to Carla, I guess.

It’s better than that marriage, what I have with my mates. The bond is amazing, often very intense. The way I feel devoted to these people, the way I can feel their sensations and emotions in my body, the way we are bonded, it’s beyond anything I could have imagined.

It’s only that you get used to things, even really intense things, and you get used to them faster than you’d expect you would.

I spend too much time reflecting on boredom itself.

What is boredom?

Is it simply not having anything to do?

I think it’s more complicated than that. I can be bored while doing things. Like, while gathering up the trash in the apartment or loading the dishwasher? While doing those things, I’m bored.

It’s because I can do those actions on auto-pilot. I don’t have to think. I can act, but my brain is free.

So, I begin to think that boredom is about not having anything engaging to think about.

But I also get bored with activities that require a lot of focus, I find, and the reason for this is just that they’re demanding, and I’d rather not waste my energy on doing hard things when I could just relax.

Except relaxation is boring.

What do I want?

Maybe that’s the problem. I don’t want anything. I have everything I need. The way that Coltrain is perfectly happy to keep us on as if we’re staff at Cedar Falls means we don’t need to work. Anything else we need, we just get, easily.

I mention boredom to Striker once and he gets real philosophical about the whole thing, opining about God and taking time to notice the little things and being grateful and all this other stuff. He says that boredom is about paying too much attention to what we are lacking.

“Notice what we have, Arrow,” he says in this voice of his that I have come to realize is his sermon voice, where he sounds all ponderous and wise and whatever.

Maybe he’s right?