I love beyond measure that aurelia is screening resumes that include skills like Zamboni proficiency, and that Sophia is able to pinpoint what history those skills indicate.
ION, I am more than a little broken--one of my oldest and dearest and most complicated friends died late last night or early this morning, and I am slowly unraveling (long story *very* short, imagine either Angela or Rickie and Rayanne, probably a bit more Rickie as there was never any sexual rivalry involved, with the passage of enough time to heal the estrangement and begin to rediscover the connection and delight and playfulness). I can't and won't accept that she is past tense, that she was here in the world 24 hours ago but not 18, and that I pottered along another few hours before finding out.
She lives (I should say lived but I can't) just a few blocks from here, in the apartment she grew up in, caring for her agoraphobic and increasingly disabled mother until this past weekend, when apparently she got food poisoning or flu or something and couldn't keep anything down for two days and spent yesterday hallucinating from dehydration but refusing to go for help (she had the only phone in the place and her mother couldn't call for help). And sometime overnight she left, and this morning her mother broke down the bedroom door and found her.
I'm gutted. And I feel super fucking selfish for feeling gutted, when nothing I feel now is a fucking speck on the horizon of what she went through before she let go. But we'd only just reconnected, and she was so weird and difficult and infinitely precious. And wasted, and lost, and one fucking ER visit and an IV could have saved her.
Hec and Matilda are incredible, but I feel so fucking broken.
And I'm so sorry to vomit all this up. Where else can I go with this?