Twisted Fate

It has a certain symmetry to it, and while I have always liked the word rather more than the definition, I may be coming to appreciate the concept.
I'm about to buy a house in the one place I never wanted to live. And I somehow couldn't be happier after being handed life's lemons.
In the scheme of things, it is not that long past that I left the district, the capitol, the beltway boys behind. I spurned the traffic and the emotional gridlock and the fraternity of men who run think they run this country. I intended never to return.
For work and for marriage, I broke the promise. I broke down crying. I broke with personal traditional and I begged my husband in the middle of the night to pledge I wouldn't have to die in this place, where everything seems corrupt, where everyone becomes pasty and gray-eyed with work. I broke.
And in the candlelight, I sat and I faced the shadow in the inhumanity of the tower of white-walled, beige-carpeted luxury apartments. The months lengthened and when my spirit bent and bowed, it was not the goddess that saved me.
I did it. Day by day I learned to live in the body I am in, to inhabit my own self truly at last. I learned to find the women who would stand with me in the face of that fraternity, women who would not settle, who would not give, who would not only hope but act and laugh as they did.
And when my husband asked me what I thought my heart would long to hear, `Do you want to go?' I was almost disappointed. Why should I be chased away by men with a penchant for hostility and their fingers on the button? How could I leave now, when I have so much work to do? Plus, I'll take it as a sign that our realtor runs a Chinese medicine business on the side.
We stayed. We sang. We thanked the wolf and the spider and the symmetry.
The lemonade tastes good here.