Ode to the Back of Her Knees

A Story by ginsy

Sometimes there just isn't anything left to say on the matter.

Once upon a time there was a fairy tale with no princes, no towers, and especially no happy endings. Perhaps the stark lack of these things makes the story less fairy and more tale, perhaps not, but the teller of this particular yarn feels that it doesn't really matter that much, in the end. The story itself is what it is and framing it as a romantic and poignant and what not does not change the true nature of it, whatever that may be.

Calling it a fairy tale, specifically, may be a misnomer then, but it is certainly a tragedy, in the most trite sense of the word.

We'll start again then.

Once upon a time there was no fairy tale, only a tragedy, but really what there was was a girl named Jane and a girl named Abigail and a man named Peter. Jane and Abigail are friends, and to most people, that is all they ever were. And maybe in reality, however, subjective, that really is all they ever were.

The thing was, Abigail married Peter and while Jane always retained some jealously over this fact, it eventually came to light that a fair number of people had guessed incorrectly as to whom she was jealous of exactly.

The teller of this story feels the need to say right here that this is not a love story, or a drama or whatever silly little genre title an audience would try to place on it. The teller of this story feels that to understand the true nature of this thing, whatever you want to call it, you must first understand a little about Jane.

Jane's parents were painfully normal in the way that rich college students at small liberal arts schools desperately try to forget and never mention, in the way that small town nobodies call quaint, and really, that's exactly what they are. Quaint. Her parents were painfully normal and her life was painfully normal except that Jane herself was not painfully normal. Jane was extraordinary in the way that tragic geniuses are, shunned as children, then as adults, then honored in their death. Only, Jane has yet to make it to the death part of this cycle.

So, she was just a tragic genius. Her teachers found her hard to deal with, her peers found her hard to deal with, and though they would never ever ever ever say it, her parents found her hard to deal with as well.

Jane was what peers, later in life, would call eccentric. She didn't like to be touched, she didn't enjoy small talk or conversations outside of her specific interests at all really, and had no real friends for most of school. All would gush about how smart she was though, about how she spoke to teachers as if they were disobedient children, and how she never did homework but made A's in tests just to prove that she could.

If we asked her peers then though, they'd say she was weird and that'd be the end of it. And she was, weird that is.

Jane's "once upon a time" really started in a college literature class, when Abigail sat down next to her and something about the entirely ordinary way that she bantered with her, the totally nice way in which she humored even the most grating of Jane's habits endeared Jane to her and while Jane was still weird or eccentric or whatever word you'd like, now Abigail was joined at her hip, the curves at which formed such a natural line that those who saw them together thought it predestined.

Jane had no other friends and she didn't want them.

This is who Jane is.

Abigail and Jane moved in with each other their junior year of college and things continued much the same. Jane had a penchant for ignoring things such as health, and hygiene, and cleaning and getting up in the morning or going to bed at night and Abigail had a penchant for being something of a motherhen with a patient streak a mile long and it all worked out just fine. There's no way to know where Jane would without Abigail, but the teller of this story imagines that it'd be much the same place she is now.

Peter came along when Abigail was 25 and Jane was 22 and though Jane couldn't stand him, her and Abigail had had one of their rare fights in which it was expressed that Jane could be a touch clingy, a touch controlling. Due to the this, Jane attempted to make nice with her roommate's (repulsive, reptilian, idiotic, notgoodenoughforher) boyfriend. Later, she would come to regret this because the idiot went and proposed and really the whole affair was just disgusting in nature.

The day Abigail moved out was quite possibly one of the worst moments of Jane's life though she never said so and never will. Abigail took her things and she left. It was not out of malice and it was not out of regret or any other negative emotion, but Abigail kept saying things like "her life was starting" and it was leaving Jane feeling like she was nothing, and she kept imagining her saying to someone (she didn't know who, she didn't really talk to anyone besides Abigail) that she was just someone that she was friends with a long long long time ago but the thought made her ill.

The other thing the teller of this story feels is important to understand is that the first time Jane touched any kind of drug was when she was 16 and she never really stopped touching drugs afterwords, her head just moved so so so fast and all these thoughts just whirled around in her head like a solar system like the vast emptiness just constant cosmic motion of space, comets chasing each other burning huge gaping holes in dead rocks. So there's that, also.

Whether Abigail ever knew that is hard to say. Maybe she did and just elected to believe that since there was nothing she could do about it there was no point in even addressing it maybe she did but pretended to herself that she didn't. Maybe she honestly didn't know, Jane had no illusions that she was a genius by any means.

But, the nature of reality is that just because someone doesn't know about something or doesn't look or doesn't acknowledge doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

And it continued to exist.

On the night of their wedding, after all the speeches and the dancing and what not, Jane went back to their apartment and got trashed enough to just make her head stop for a while. It took a lot of smack to do that.

She imagined Peter running his hands down the rounded curve of Abigail's hip, and she imagined how he wouldn't know to marvel at the work of architectural perfection that was the line of her neck or the grace of her hands or even the smooth skin on the back of her knees.

She faded into oblivion to the thought of him never expressing such as that, never complimenting her on the sharpness of her elbows or the elegance of her collar bone. Never never never.

Things all happened very quickly after that. Abigail began calling less and less and eventually didn't call at all. Jane never did find out if she knew or if she didn't, and as mentioned earlier, what Abigail did or didn't know about certain subjects is ultimately irrelevant.

Perhaps tragedy was also a misnomer. Jane is still alive, hasn't managed to over dose yet and Abigail is happy as well. They don't talk and the people who know Jane describe her as "endearing, sort of autistic" and they're not really wrong.

The beginning was a lie then, too looking back on it. There was a prince and there was a happy ending, just not for everyone, but the teller of this story supposes that that's just life.

There's no moral to this story. There's no great lesson for you to take out of it.

We never wonder about the people in "once upon a time" stories with no happy endings because we already know what happens to them. There's no philosophical statement to be made of that either.

Things are what they are, and sometimes, that's the only happily ever after that you're going to get.