by Pfantazm

In the author's note to the story before this, I said I'd called it "Strings Attached" but couldn't be sure why. I've had a couple of years to think about it, since that was the very first story I ever posted, and I've figured out why the title is fitting. We all have strings attached to us, and they keep us from falling. The people on the other end may be quite distant, geographically or otherwise, but they're there, and we can sometimes still feel their pull, their influence on us.

One of the letters I got in response to the story said that it was too pat. Matt's problems should not be over so quickly. I think he missed the point. The problems aren't over, but they were never going to be over until a moment like the one in SA. Some of us need to be told bluntly because our assumptions are too deeply rooted to be challenged.

So there had to be a follow-up, to see what came later. The message I sent in the first story isn't everything.

But if we need our strings to keep us from falling, why is this story called "Strings Released"? I'm sure you'll figure that out.

	By seven o'clock, I was in the hospital. At ten, they'd finished the blood work. At the stroke of midnight, I was in surgery. It was the second time I'd come close to death, but the circumstances had been so different. In the first, the circumstances I was in had left me desperate to be free of them. In the end, it had been up to me, with help from a friend, to save myself. Now my body had lashed out at me, and I had to rely on my circumstances to save me. I wished they would. I had awakened with a small pain below my stomach. I had a nice long conversation on the phone with a friend, and when I hung up, I noticed the pain was far worse. I spoke up, and said that I probably should go to see a doctor. Luke drove me in a borrowed car to the clinic that I always went to. It was quite a long distance away, and potholes we went over irritated me. I had moved at the beginning of the year and hadn't found all the necessary services and such near my new home, even after six months. It had been only recently that I had found a bank branch nearby. The doctor I saw told me repeatedly, clearly, as if talking to a small child rather than an adult in his twenties, that I should go to a hospital near my new home. It might have been intestinal flu or it might be appendicitis. I'd had a similar pain when I was much younger, and I had been kept waiting for several days while they tried to make the determination. This time the doctors did not want to dally and dither. When my turn came up for a bed among the inner sancta of the building, rather than the bland waiting room, I was prodded in my abdomen, and asked if it hurt more when they pushed or when they let go. There was a second pain on my left, whereas most humans keep their appendices on their right. They would perform some exploratory surgery, and if the appendix needed to, it would come out. I was ready to agree to everything my surgeon had to say. He may have had a speech prepared to convince me that the surgery was necessary, and that my trepidation, and the horror that may have been legible on my face was going to have to be endured. I countered by saying that logically, I understood it all, but my emotions were having their way now. Luke had been with me through all of this, from wondering what was taking my blood work so long to come back, to enduring being asked the same questions repeatedly to make sure I had my story straight, to witnessing my signature on the release forms. He had been registered as the "friend" who brought me here when we arrived, not falling into the "relative" or "alone" categories. Despite this, they never kept him away saying that he was only a friend. It seemed the cliche was untrue, either that, or they sensed far more than we'd told. He was by my side as I was wheeled into the lobby off which the operating rooms branched. That particular cliche was genuine, as I watched the ceiling tile flow past in front my field of vision. I wasted what may have been my final thoughts on how easy the scene must be to shoot. They piled warm towels, fresh from the hemostat, on top of me, as if to immobilize me by sheer weight alone, and I met my anaesthetologist, though I couldn't even remember her name a few hours later, and then Luke was by my side again saying, "They're done. It's over." The disjointed memory and the loss of an hour, along with the realization of what took place in that hour, left me quaking helplessly. I reflected back on the time that had passed between my two near-death moments. Andy had helped me through the first one. He had gone out on the ledge to join me when the moment had required it, and escorted me back inside. He watched me very carefully in the weeks after, ensuring that I was feeling better about myself. I found work, and more friends, and they did help to stabilize me, but the thing that held me together most was hearing, several times a day, that I was worth something. If the abuse had done its damage through repetition, then the cure should reflect that. Our relationship lasted not much beyond that. In the simplest possible terms, I was bringing him down, but that's not very fair to him. Being a boyfriend and, essentially, caregiver to one such as me was more than he bargained for. His is maybe the one case where it really was him and not me. It hurt me a lot, and I did cry, which I rarely do. The pair of us were by no means a workable couple, and Andy was wise to do what he did. I forgave him easily. The first day or so saw me on some painkiller or other. I was tethered to a hatrack on wheels via an IV drip, and the tube I found still attached to my abdomen was quite disturbing when I found it. It had all been explained to me what they were for, but I hadn't been present for the explanation. The Tylenol #3 did nothing for me. Acetaminophen (which Tylenol #3 emphatically isn't) had never had an effect on my system, and the nurse scoffed at my suggestion that I had planned to use aspirin when I got home to battle any discomfort I would feel. Morphine merely made me very drowsy. People speak of morphine dreams and a high that one should enjoy while it lasts, but I saw none of it. I slept most of the second day. In between naps, Luke and a friend from my new building came by separately to wish me well. Luke works a few blocks from the hospital. That's very nice. I had it explained to me again what the tube was, and that the surgeon had determined that there was no way that this particular infection had arisen in 12 hours, which was how long it had been from the time I got up that fateful Saturday morning and the time I had gone under the knife. He put it at closer to a week. My neighbour told me stories of people she'd known who had had appendix trouble but a theme among them was that they hadn't been 100% for days and months prior, and while they might be well enough, say, to eat dinner at a party, they knew in hindsight that they had felt a little off. I had felt nothing. The doctor even went so far as to suggest that the appendix had flared up before at some point but I had recovered. I got very afraid after that. I'm not sure I would have slept if not for the morphine. I've never understood the need some people feel to escape their lives through drugs. My next boyfriend after Andy was into pot, for example, which some consider the least objectionable drug, even compared to alcohol and nicotine. I worked in a store that sold travel maps exclusively. When Jake was hired, he came with a resume with experience in just that kind of store. He was somewhat rebellious, but not in the classic way. He was often on the move because of the massive student loan debt he was under, dodging his creditors. And he did drugs, which in my sheltered life had been quite forbidden territory. I didn't indulge even though Jake would have happily shared with me. I saw it as a potential mistake I didn't want to risk making. I'd been accustomed to being the sober one when my brother and his friends had gone out to the bar. Jake was a great lover: energetic, playful and attentive. He taught me a lot about sex. We were together, naked, when Y2K turned over, when everyone was worried about the world coming to an end with a digitized bang, and I couldn't imagine spending it any other way. We had an open relationship, though he would be the only one who might exercise it. I was too shy, and maybe too old-fashioned to indulge if I thought I was with someone. Our one requirement was that if we did stray outside the partnership, we'd tell the other person what went on. I thought I would greatly enjoy hearing about what he'd done. If Jake stayed true to his word, then he was monogamous despite the chance he had. And maybe that was the problem. He had been the one who wanted the open relationship, and I had acceded. In our last days, Jake disappeared. We had been apart for a few days, and were looking forward to getting back together again. He said he would call at a certain time to make arrangements to finally meet again, and didn't. When he finally contacted me, I knew what was coming. We went down by the beaches near the West End downtown. We walked a bit, and Jake very gently broke up with me. He told me that I was too good for him, but Andy had already taken the line. I knew he valued his freedom too much. Perhaps he'd gotten a interesting invitation, and found himself unable to accept it. Either way, that was it. I heaved a single gut-wrenching sob on the way home, when I knew I needed to be held, and the only candidate was walking the wrong way. After that, there was nothing. I had already mourned the loss of him, and had grown accustomed to dealing with pain from which no relief could be had. I still wonder where he is sometimes. The next couple of days left me in bed with a sharp pain I'd contracted from shifting around in bed too much. I pulled an abdominal muscle of some sort and it left me hurting for days after others would have recovered completely. Friends came by fairly often, bringing silly balloons, toys, and other things to occupy my mind while I healed. I had several bandages of varying sizes spread scattershot across my gut which made me afraid to look at them. Occasionally a nurse would come by, take my blood pressure and temperature with an efficient gadget that seemed to visit everyone on the floor several times a day. My IV bag was often left empty as they weaned me off it and back to normal food. Fluctuating between the two left me unused to the drip, and each new infusion felt like a cold creep up my arm. I liked my time alone while I convalesced. One of my two neighbours in the same room were another fellow who'd had his appendix out the same day as I had, and who would coincidentally leave the same day I did. We would have had a lot to talk about, if he'd spoken English or I Cantonese. The other was an elderly gentleman who harassed the nurses on a regular basis, and who would speak to no one at all, sometimes announcing in a clear voice that he could not sleep. Him, I ignored. He reminded me too much of what I might become. No one visited him, and his mind was clearly going. The latter frightened me far more than the former. I'd had a lifetime of loneliness, and could bear it through the years, but only with mental pursuits. I love to read, and recreational math is a hobby of mine. If I lost my faculties, I don't know what I would do. I spent the months after Jake left me feeling very sorry for myself. I buried myself in prime numbers and polyominoes, holed up in my basement apartment. I interacted with the world as little as possible, except to discuss sphere packing or to argue over the dimensions of a fair three-sided die online. I was pitiful. Even I couldn't sustain that kind of sadness for long though. My short time with Andy had been the push I had needed to get started. Jake had continued the work. His spirit was great, bold and defiant, and it meshed well with my stubbornness. Losing him was painful, but he had helped me to feel like I could be loved by someone. Right now what I needed was time to explore these ideas on my own. As I discovered on the ledge, having one person for whom your death would hold great meaning is reason enough not to die. This much is true, but it's not the whole solution. If you can't also bring things around so that that person is you, there's always a chance of slipping back. People enter and leave our lives so randomly. If you have to rely on others, you can never be secure. I pushed myself forward, sure in the knowledge that there had been those who had looked at me and found me desirable, or knowledgeable, or special in some other way. People were not rejecting me out of hand when they met me. Most often they had little opinion of me at all, positive or negative. I dated some in this time. Nothing spectacular happened. There were some who were too cloying. They saw me as perfect boyfriend material, with a little bit of work. One was so forward that he frightened me right off. Others I saw a couple of times and we each found we didn't really want to see the other again. I learned about my own tastes, and that I really could have better expectations for a date or boyfriend than tolerance of me as a person. I found that I rather liked myself. The night before I was released, I called the nurse about my pain. One of the incisions was in exactly the same place as it was manifesting and I told her I wanted some reassurance that I hadn't undone some of the surgery. Without touching me she told me I just had tight muscles after the operation and had strained one. I needed a painkiller. I told her that the painkillers hadn't done much. The morphine had only made me very drowsy. She tried to argue that that was relief, even though I felt the pain while I was awake. It was late, and I was too exhausted to have this conversation. She brought two of the pills that did nothing and fed them to me. Under the influence of the useless codeine, I spent the next half an hour bitching her out in absentia the way I would have if I could think. Then I wrote up a letter in duplicate for her superiors to look at. I didn't want the damn drug and she shouldn't have forced it on me. She should have seen they were ineffective from my chart, given that I'd cycled through so many over my stay there, and I hadn't had any for over 24 hours. The next morning, Luke came to pick me up and take me to our home. I was well enough for travel and to eat normal food. I would have to check back with my surgeon after a few weeks, but there shouldn't have been any problems. The nurse came and removed the tube from me, and it felt exactly like being punched in the stomach, hard. Luke waited patiently while I recovered again. I'd been warned that it would hurt some, but feeling was like I'd been given a final insult to my person on my way out. By the time I was wheeled out to the car I couldn't feel it anymore. For several days I wasn't able to sleep in the same bed as Luke. It was a waterbed, and my strained muscle wouldn't allow me to climb out without a lot of pain. He missed me, I know, while I slept on the couch. I met him online about the time when I'd given up looking for a boyfriend, as it so often happens. I was in the IRC chatroom for my city and made a math joke: What's the square root of 69? Ate something. Luke came back with the precise answer, 8.307 to three decimal places. We got to talking for a few hours, and we clicked. I visited his apartment more often than he came to mine, since it was more convenient for me, and his place was nicer than mine. I met several of his neighbours, and pretty soon, I was a fixture. I was surprised to find a place where I could belong. I moved in at the beginning of the year. He fussed over me, and changed my dressings when I didn't want to look at what might be hiding underneath. Soon I won't need the bandages anymore and I'll have to. He got upset when it seemed like every time he touched me I was screaming in pain. More often, I was about to use that muscle and he helped me through it. He loves me. I love him. I'm still not completely healed now, but things are getting steadily better. I still have to move carefully to keep from reopening the wounds, but now the likelyhood that this will be critical is low. Even after the point where I can move as freely as I'd like to, I'll always have my scars, to remind me of this time and of what I've lived through. It's good to have that kind of reminder, I think. Luke still worries and does what he sees as necessary to get me through, but for the most part I'm fine. It's good to have his support, and better to know that it's there for when I can do things for myself in case I relapse. It's happened a couple of times when I've ended up in agony for carrying myself the wrong way, and he's always been right there. I can't do it all myself, and I can't lean on him all the time. Somewhere in between we work it out.

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