‘The venom stole her sanity’
Once upon a long long time ago …
Lived a boy and girl, best friends.
Till a million tears in the fabric of the invisible string between them collapsed.
No I don’t write like that. I never did. But man, that felt weirdly good to type out!
I had listened to “The Fate of Ophelia” about eleventy trillion times since it was released two weeks (!) ago before it hit me.
That a friend and I had always talked about having a daughter named Ophelia.
I was in the car after a very stressful weekend of car repairs — one tire exploded … I bought a new tire … then on the same day, a truck on Sawgrass unloaded a bunch of wooden bricks that I ran over … and I now had TWO FLAT TIRES, including the one I had bought earlier.
And as I drove around looking for a place to inflate those TWO tires enough to get them to Tire Kingdom on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale …
I started cackling maniacally.
Me. With a daughter. Named Ophelia. Was my teenage dream.
Good lord, someone go hug that girl.
Don’t get me wrong. I expected to be a famous author/journalist first. Then retire to an island and have a baby who I could watch growing up because I had enough money in the bank to do that.
The guy, I’ve written about here before. I don’t say much because some things are just sacred.
But I know I wrote about how he told my mom he can’t hear Bon Jovi without thinking of me.
Taylor Swift was born while we were still friends, but I’m sure he has no idea I’m such a superfan that I went to The Eras Tour four times.
Including one year ago today, in Miami!
He never listened to any bands that made it into the 1990s, let alone through them. So I don’t really associate anything on the radio with him.
But I know he had to have heard “The Fate of Ophelia.”
Does he remember those two kids who put that fantasy together, to have a little girl with that name?
Anyway, my cackling was really just at me. Also I was stressed the absolute hell out.
Which was a problem for us. I definitely said and did whatever I pleased. And that didn’t end well for me with him.
In any event, I hope he can smile and even laugh when he hears the song.
And, like me, move on and, as Taylor sang in “Opalite,” “mess up before and mess up again.”