What do lovers see in one another? That's a good question, but right now Francine is still trying to figure out what to get Jake for his birthday tomorrow, so she's not reflecting on philosophical questions about love. She's been so busy with Mart Mart and trying to get another job to get out of Mart Mart that she's let the day rush up on her. While the house is quiet with Jake at work and Masani gone to pick up Donald, she thinks what to get Jake. At least she took care of the birthday cake already, ordering a cake of a woman's naked torso that will make Jake blush. That's one of the things she loves about him. He's a bit of a prude. She hopes nothing much else happens on Jake's birthday. She doesn't expect the world to end but people thinking it is going to end could make a fuss and cause a bother. They should all relax and read a bit more, perhaps The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus. So what if the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way tomorrow? All that will make Francine want to do is enjoy a delicious Milky Way candy bar. What do people want the world to end for? Think of all the sequels to films and novels that would never get made if that happened.
Hmm . . . in that case, maybe the world should end, she thinks.
She changes her mind though and remembers one of Jake's dreams that he told her about. It was about a Christmas tree farm and at first he thought it would be a nice holiday dream driven by drinking too much eggnog the night before, but it soon turned horrific when Jake realized he was a tree in the farm and all his family and friends were getting slaughtered. He survived, but he knew Christmas would come again, and next year he would be bigger and more likely to be cut down. What's it like to live when you know you're going to die? Like going on a roller coaster at an amusement park, enjoy the ride while it lasts. Francine hopes everyone feels a bit silly for thinking the world was going to end when it doesn't.
At least Francine hopes it doesn't. North seems to agree with her. Jake told her that North has started doing online dating. Apparently, he's gotten over Oc, after telling Jake he'd never love again after what Oc had done to him. Oc did to him? He did it to himself, by dating her in the first place, Francine thinks. She's touched though that his hope for love springs eternally. She felt like he did once and thought she'd never find love again, if she'd ever found it in the first place. She had pretty much given up on anything beyond a drunken evening with Manuel when Jake showed up. She thinks of all the silly stuff she once wrote in her notebooks about how life had no happy endings, no happily ever after. In fact, nothing ever ends, but she's happy enough at least so she'll settle for that. Thank God she won't have to spend another New Year's Eve alone or, worse, working at Yaws. She thinks she'd rather have an asteroid hit earth than go back to that point in her life. God may not play dice, but this time God bowled a strike, unless this is just a story told by a cockroach to pass the time when they become the dominant life forms on Earth after humans have been extincted. Maybe she'll make Jake a zine about how she feels about him, and tell him that in the great zine tradition, she's sorry she arrived so late.
No, too mushy, she decides. The relationship isn't Eden, but it might be as close as she gets. So far it's no apocalyptic romance, where the narrator has to get drunk to tell the story, the lies we tell ourselves to get through another day. Before she just had her blog. Now she has Jake too. She's not quite sure why he got bored with his blog, but hopes he never gets bored with her, but if he does, then they'll call it quits. Life will go on. It's not a novel. In life there are good guys and bad guys, but mostly they're all just people.
She hears Jake's car in the driveway. She still doesn't know what to get him for his birthday and she's running out of time, but she knows that he gets her and she gets him, and that somehow in all the confusion of life, they rhyme.
When he comes in the house, she sees love.
Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel.
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