Chapter 14: Margo unbound.

I never had a conventional spring break. Once I had spent two years surviving by myself —and outside the perverse circle of influence of Satsuki— I felt I deserved a vacation. As I found the traditional alcohol and sex driven spring break in Florida quite dispiriting, I devised a more interesting idea: to go to Ireland, where 50% of Ted's ancestry had come from. Maybe I could use time there to find out more about his origins —my origins, 25%. Maybe he was there, in Galway, every day, all day waiting in a pub for his lost daughter.

Margo liked the idea. Being affluent as she was, she felt generous and wanted to pay for my trip. I rejected that idea, as I would have felt that I owed her —that I had to pay her back with my company. I'm glad that I did so. Besides, I had some money saved from my frugal lifestyle.

We flew from JFK to DUB. That was our last leg. It was a March for excitement. I would stretch that Spring Break as much as I could. We both were pushing it: with a little over two weeks in front of us, we were ebullient imagining the insane amount of experiences and possibilities that our travel would bring. A decent amount of hours went into planning the route. I considered that investigating Ted's background wouldn't interfere with the fun of the trip: meeting people, learning from them. Basking in the cultural gap that made us so close yet so far.

Margo had a different kind of trip in her mind. However, she was willing to adapt —initially. And what initially seemed like a great travel mate, it turned to be... absent. Because what she had in mind was a Florida spring break in Ireland. I didn't mind her sleeping around. I couldn't engage in her kind of compulsions but I was perfectly fine with them. However, they turned to be quite incompatible with what I expected to do.

She was getting drunk and laid, drunk and laid, drunk and laid. Dublin, Kilkenny, Cork, Killarney. All over the place. Permanently hungover. Wake up in the early evening, hang out with the guys, get drunk, get laid —safely, or not so much. Restart —with another set of guys.

In a way, her arbitrary sharing of sexual gratification was a fair affair. As those encounters were spontaneous and at random, she wasn't establishing an otherwise shallow set of filters. Almost anything would do. Guys didn't have to be funny, handsome, nor even pretend to be nice. They just needed to be within a six feet radius and to not be outright psychos in order to participate in a sex lottery in which there were a lot of prizes given.

Comparatively, I would have felt like a boring old lady —hadn't I chosen the smug way of feeling morally superior to that behavior. A subconscious choice, as I logically can't criticize her ways to enjoy her youth.

Her innocent look seemed to confound some guys, but a reputation quickly formed if we stayed at the same place more than a couple days. In the hostels, I was the one that heard those morning comments about her sluttiness: how those guys were excited about how likely it seemed that she'd be the one sucking their cocks next. Conversations about how many guys she had kissed the previous night with her innocent looking lips before randomly taking one to the bathroom to finish the job.

Many of those comments weren't precisely nice. I was angry at some of those guys who seemed to get their conversational hard-on with comments that outright debased Margo. But I wasn't Margo, after all. Far from it. Although I truly regretted not confronting them.

None of hers were zipless fucks.

All in all, I never told her anything about those conversations I eavesdropped. I knew she was playing her own game, and it would be pointless to indicate how worthless I thought some of those guys were. Sometimes, I doubted that she thought more of them than being just pieces of meat. To me, though, it seemed that she was rewarding arbitrary assholes that didn't respect her at all. It was somewhat incoherent: her sexual expression didn't even show dominance. Instead, it showed a will to satisfy —as if she was seeking to eventually become appreciated. Then, paradoxically, she would feel dejected and bitch about how crappy their sexual performance had been. I partially envied her sexual openness yet complete deplored the social expression of it. It didn't seem healthy at all.

Regardless, it wasn't any indirect offense or judgment from my part what drove us apart in that trip. It was merely the fact that we had very different intentions and expectations. And we hadn't spent much time together anyway. After a first week, it was quite obvious that we'd be better off splitting. In a strange way —as we kept following similar routes. As we arrived to Galway from Doolin, we decided to choose different hostels. She didn't care nor appear to take offense. She just kept doing what she went there to do.

I would meet her again in amicable terms, but we wouldn't consider each other a real friend anymore. I'm not sure why. Funnily, she would comment on how good an Ireland trip we had —as if our trips had had anything in common.