Christmas?
December 27, 2010 - 6:24 p.m.

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Laying on the wool carpet, hair spread out on the hot air vent, staring up at the christmas tree.

The room is dark, the shadows thick and brown and cold. The only light comes from the rainbow bulbs on the christmas tree which cast soft pine-needle shadows on the ceiling.

The tip of my nose is cold, and so are my toes and fingers. I try to put my fingers in my hair, over the hot air, but the lingering dampness in the strands just makes them colder.

That Christmas tree. I am acutely aware that my happiness is directly linked to my mother's happiness, entirely against my will.

~

Something tickled my back.

I went to pull off my sweater, and discovered one strand of my three strand pearl necklace has snapped, and is dangling down my back, shedding pearls.

Aren't the knots supposed to stop this?

Three pearls, and one of them is missing entirely. The other two are sequestered in the small silk jewellry bag my mother gave me for Christmas.

I'm still fucking pissed about that necklace. Where is that last pearl?

Of course it's the tiniest.

~

My foot aches. I stepped on something.

Well, I stepped on something last week. Namely, my sewing scissors. Put a big ole cut on the bottom of my foot. Bled like a dickens, and just when I had to wear my steel toed boots for four hours, too.

"You'll never guess," Rikki says as we all stand around in the loading dock of the arena, rubbing our arms to stay warm.

"What?" says I.

Rikki proceeds to tell me how she broke her little toe, just that afternoon.

"That's nothin'," I says, then tell her about stepping on my sewing scissors. I'd been thinking about calling the steward and saying I couldn't do the call, because I was bleeding that much. Fortunately for me, foot wounds, like hand wounds, seal up quickly.

But truly, I think she had it worse.

There is some comfort to be had knowing you're not the only person limping around at work because you did something incredibly stupid, like leave sewing scissors on the floor or walk into a bookcase.

~

My phone rang while I was having lunch with Candace (veal cutlet sandwich; best in the city).

It was my mother, so I excused myself to take it.

"I found your pearl!" she tells me without bothering to say hello.

It, apparently, had fallen into one of my socks, which my mother was in the process of washing.

My mother, washing my socks.

It makes me feel like a kid again.

~

"Rosie has a lot of poise," the hostess tells the room in general. Everyone turns to look at me, and I struggle not to shift uncomfortably.

"She does," my mother agrees, though I don't think she believes it much.

"Rosie always had a lot of poise," the hostess tells her audience. "Even when she was a kid, she had a lot of poise." There is a pause. "You're very beautiful, Rosie."

Why do people always tell me that?

I never hear anybody else being called beautiful, even if they ARE beautiful.

I have long suspected that it is not that I am beautiful, exactly, but I have a quality which makes people stop and stare. A certain enigmatic curiousness, an unusual way of tilting my head when I'm listening, that makes people faintly uncomfortable, which they then mistake for thinking I am beautiful.

Silly people.

Anyway, it's time for bed now.

.

~Rosie.

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