'Tis the season

I was totally going to bah humbug this. Really, I was. I have not been feeling especially festive; my bells have not, as they say, been jingling. But you know… it's Christmas! Well, near enough, anyways. Sparkly, shiny things have always been my downfall, and Christmas is the sparkliest season of them all. Presents, tinsel, ribbons, the small tree ornament we found in box that looks vaguely like it’s wearing a KKK outfit – I love them. They distract me, they are delightful (well, maybe not so much the white-supremacist mouse), and induce in me a reaction which borders on the epileptic. For but two weeks a year, I am consumed by things that flicker. Oh parents of Alexander, the small child forgotten at a Christmas light display, one day your pain will also be mine.

As I’m too lazy to really write much on this these days, in bad-sitcom style, I shall try and reflect back on all the year that was:

Last year, I was putting the final touches on a thesis that could only swim on the screen in front of me; this year, I have glasses. Last year I was 10 days off moving to a Belgian winter; this year I’m guiltily embracing the drought. Last year, I decided I was going to be a grown up, get a full-time job, and make some form of something from my life; this year I laugh at the pear-shapedness of existence and have started to grow my own vegetables.

So that’s my news, not so exciting perhaps, but, you know, in times of turmoil and economic crisis, I feel pretty lucky to be able to label this one a Good Year. Thanks for your company, kids, have a lovely and safe Christmas and New Year.

Yours,

Heroverthere.

Living the city

Wine with friends, with the heat on my back so strong I have to keep my jacket on. It was not made for these conditions and I have never dressed for the weather well. But covered or no, as we talk the sun chews slowly on us. Those across from me grow rosier as we drink, and not only from the alcohol.

I think something broke today, and maybe for the last time. Trust is a slender thread, a delicate filigree that can never be wrought too fine. Once, my favourite bracelet had a tiny tiger-stripe of a flaw: dropped, it shattered into 12 pieces. The same friends who counsel me now bought another, not from Venice this time, but one I treasure more than the first.

And so we drink, and we talk.

And then I wander home. I follow my sheep-track, the urban furrow I trace almost every day which winds from home to the city, and back again.

There are so many people. Girls are in dresses, impossibly short, and they stagger, emu-like in their high high heels. I watch a punk with a foot-long mohawk play on a giant chess-set. I think he makes a good move.

Men keep looking at my chest. I’ve gone up a cup size, my top is tight, and I’m tall. My breasts are at eye-height. I should know this by now. Buy new underwear; buy a new top. Or, at the very least, cross your arms.

I pretend to ice skate down the slope of the escalator. Not for the first time, people think I’m strange. But it’s cooler when I get out, like a fridge door opening on a hot, sticky day. With my bags I walk, past the commission houses, past the cemetery, and the callus on my foot rubs and my left heel is still sore from the shoes I wore the other day. And I walk, past your street and I walk into mine. And I turn the key, jiggle it, hoping that this time it will catch and I won’t be out here for hours, looking like I’m trying to jimmy the door to my own house.

And the wind lips at me like your kisses.

And maybe it's enough.