Oh how it feels so real

Lying here

With no one near

Only you

And you can hear me…

Calliope Torres and Helena Peabody were old and unlikely friends. 

They met on a university campus, when Callie was still contemplating medical school and Helena was thinking about dropping out of art history. Helena tried halfheartedly to get Callie into bed and when that failed, they decided to be friends. They smoked too much pot, drank too much wine, and thoroughly enjoyed wasting the first few years of their education before Helena left to travel and Callie got serious about her studies.

Year later, a random text message from Callie prompted Bette and Helena to a dinner with her and the person she was seeing…

“She’s moved to LA with a woman!” Helena fumed jokingly while Bette buckled into the driver’s side.  Helena was rapidly typing something into her phone. She was calling Callie an ‘appropriator’ which was just an inside joke from a time when Helena came back from Mexico wearing a poncho.  “Bisexual…pfft…” Helena laughed at the reply she got, not because Callie called her a ‘bisexual-hating-poncho-wearing-lesbian’ but because she had written ‘poncho’ in capital letters. She wrote back that Callie was an awfully late bloomer.

Bette laughed when she glanced over her girlfriend’s shoulder. The text returned said something about Helena’s bruised ego. “It’s true.” Bette said with a smirk.  “She turned you down…Ow!” The jab in her side wasn’t that hard but she played it up.

They met up with Callie and her new girlfriend, a heart surgeon named Erica Hahn, at an upscale restaurant downtown. 

As with any new interaction between lesbian, it seemed, the conversation turned to popular culture and the dismal offerings for gay viewers.

“Fuck american television” Erica chattered on about her favorite soap opera which had just axed a major lesbian character. “There’s some fascist up there in TV land and it is directly impacting our ability to see ourselves portrayed in healthy relationships anywhere in the culture. What kind of ‘happily ever after’ do we ever get?”

“Why do we need ‘happily ever after’?” Callie threw a slightly frightened look Erica’s way.  They had been together for just over a year, and were still figuring out some of the other’s quirks.