All I Won't For Christmas

You throw up after your second half-slice of cheesecake, and feel lucky to find an aged bottle of generic mint mouthwash under the bathroom sink. The whole act feels as illicit as having had sex in your host’s bed, and you exacerbate the situation by stripping off your winter boots and jean skirt to stand on the scale. It’s old, stuck on a figure you hope isn’t accurate, and you’re groaning as the needles might under the weight of so much Christmas dinner and regret. Footsteps creak past the door, and you shimmy quickly back into your clothes.

It’s only grandma, fortunately, who would never imagine you were doing anything other then usual business in there. Talks of weight loss only lead to her boasting that she doesn’t need to lose or gain, but only, at eighty years of age, get back into shape. Your bone thin massage therapist cousin promises yoga and a detox diet in the new year, your husband refuses dessert and any humoring of your mania, and the chubby children dig into thirds. God, how you hope you won't have chubby children, and hate yourself for hoping.

At least the posh aunts in their skinny jeans are going home soon, and you can feel guilty and cruel in relative peace. Your metabolism can’t be to blame when they’re around. It’s just you.

Humbug

Knowing that I am not the only person ever to feel slighted by an unwanted gift does not alleviate any of the guilt that I feel. I remind myself that it is the thought that counts, but in the same mental breath I am thinking that thoughtlessness requires very little effort. I chide myself, too, for pride in the handcrafted gifts I have given, for I take as much pleasure in their creation as I do in the gifting, and it isn't like I wouldn't be doing something while watching episode after episode of The Office anyway. It's just an excuse.

"I'm working, really. JAM is just a happy coincidence."

Perhaps like all tactless young married folk, M and I have begun our collection of white elephants and re-gifts, shoved into a cardboard box in the basement like things we never cared enough to unpack. Worse still, something a loathsome roommate left behind, requiring a hit-and-run of the Goodwill lest better Samaritans of the world realize just what you're trying to pawn off on the unfortunate.

Besides, I shop there, too. One woman's trash is another's hand-painted resin seasonal showpiece, yes?

How I Could Just Kill A Man

There was something illicit about the sort of socializing that went on in the wings when I was in theatre in high school, all of us, or perhaps only me, thrilling in our roles offstage as much as on. Gathered around the couch that reeked, as a more daring actress commented, "of pepsi and sex," we would gossip, we would posture, we would rehearse - if clutching our scripts and tugging our collars and shirt sleeves in nervously mixed company could be called rehearsal.

Perhaps I was made more daring by my dance costume that flattered from hip to ankle, or perhaps I had simply seen too much Saved by the Bell in my formative years, but a Sadie Hawkins dance seemed to me the ideal moment to confess my desire to attend with a handsome boy on my arm, particularly, one with whom I shared a mutual appreciation for Rage Against the Machine. I knew who Tom Morello was and used his name in context of their greatness, hadn't he laughed when I'd done so? I quoted Zack de la Rocha in my creative writing assignments. Surely this warranted some attention?

Or a polite refusal, if toying with the brim of his baseball cap to keep from looking me in the eye as he explained his wanting to wait around for someone else to ask him could be considered polite.

The next year I wouldn't be conquered on that couch, but I would suffer hands on my breasts and sloppy kisses; I would climb the ladder to the costume loft and lay myself down in taffeta and crushed velvet, chintz, and polyester. The body of a lesser man pinned me above the stage lights, or so I like to think now so I can remember the ones that I did not know, that refused to know me, better.

I won't say they were all the same. But I'm thinking it.

The Far End of the Spectrum

Driving sometimes late at night the reception is better at the far end of the FM spectrum. You stop at a stop light turning left and there's no one you're stopping for, just following rules, and you've found a sweet spot where the signal comes in so clear the big band could be in the back seat with your reusable grocery bags and spare umbrella. You don't want to go when you've got the green light, not with the slide of the slide trombone like a lover's hand on your neck, not with the crooning soprano begging you to stay, stay, stay just a little bit longer.

When you go anyway, because you must for other rules and greater wants, her voice slips back into static. She is a fiction that flared only for a moment, though there's always a chance that it was she who was tuning just then into you, and not the other way around.

Controversy

In sickness and in health is open to interpretation, isn't it? In marriage we abide and tolerate because we love, not because our spouse is an image of flawlessness while retching into the toilet after a few too many beers, or because when they are fevered they are not whiny and prone to outrageous demands; for rich or for poor does not mean we will not complain when the rent is late, or consider ourselves fiscally responsible enough to tell our partners how to spend their tax return. We do it because our good times are really good, not because we haven't any bad times, because without bad times, without doing it not because we wouldn't rather be doing something - or occasionally even someone else - making such vows are empty.

It's about what's hard, not what's easy.

I got into a car accident today. It will be expensive to repair my - my husband's - car. It was an accident, but I was cited at fault. The absence of injury of either party, myself or the other driver, makes it easier to be angry and point fingers, to talk about carelessness and catastrophe. When my tears have stopped and there's room to start worrying about things like tow trucks and fines, I am afraid to draw attention to the guilt that I feel, the desire I have to be comforted. I want to be tough, I want to take responsibility, I want to be loved for not having fucked up in the first place.

I don't expect to be coddled when I've made mistakes, but goddamn is it hard when I'm not.

Petals like Pinwheels

I've finally parted with my bouquet. When we returned from our honeymoon and it was hanging on by a thread in a vase of stagnant water, I dumped the water out and returned it to the window. In the past week the stems had begun to mold, white threads like spider's silk cottoning between the withered heads of roses and chrysanthemums. I held it where it was bound still by the ribbon from my wedding dress, lifting the wilted purple sprays and letting them slump again where they had dried.

So I took the bouquet outside and up the little slope of our backyard, which is more like a thicket than something suited for mowing. I stepped through the maple saplings and honeysuckle heavy with berries to the hollow tree stump and tossed my flowers inside, feeling like a girl inventing superstition again, burying something in hopes that it would grow into a new mystery.

It was harder to do than I thought it would be.

Question and Answer

I'm relieved to no longer be engaged and suffer questions like, so what are your colors?

Being newly married, however, means I'm always being asked, so how is married life?

My answer that it is a lot like unmarried life is getting a little tired. I wonder if I should invent a fiction for us? We argue about life insurance policies? I've taken to wearing aprons while cooking, cleaning, and having sex? Seems like a solid short story to me.

The Egg Someday a Woman

On hour four of our five hour drive home, there is nothing more that we want to listen to beyond breathing, the hum of the road. I recline my seat completely, loose the zipper of my party dress and curl there under my winter coat.

You start at my neck where spine gives way to scalp, fingers and nails unraveling my hastily dressed hair and my nerves. My shoulders are clay; your prints someday will be prehistoric, a history I will read in photographs when I am too wrinkled to see. I think this must be why you take pictures of me when I am undressed, so that we will both remember.

The knobs of my back are neither piano keys, guitar strings, nor the glossy depressions of brass instruments. I am more like a dinosaur who has lost her plates, who lathers daily in foaming soaps and sweet lotions to keep from showing my reptilian nature. I am dry and I hold my tongue behind my teeth not because it is forked, but because it is more like a club than an organ for chatter, pleasure, or song.

You touch me anyway where my dress falls open down my back, a silk skin I am shedding; you abandon the limits of this aperture for a hand up my skirt. I open my eyes and through the window I look beyond my own smoky reflection to the night sky, and when you put your fingers in me I see in every constellation a vessel I must fill.

Ground Control

David Bowie croons while we brush and floss our teeth, and I begin bouncing when Space Oddity reaches a climax. The mirror is flecked and my reflection giddy, while M makes all of the usual, exaggerated faces. I love him best when he unveils himself in foolishness, in monstrous contortions of his features, like a child, trying to see if hideous will stick.

I woke up sick today. Every stomach upset worries me now that I shall become unexpectedly pregnant, though I'm more in danger from vitamins taken without something to settle them, meals at odd hours or missed all together, twice the usual calories in drink. It is difficult to imagine our lives making room for a child; we're more like novelized versions of ourselves when I do imagine it, the abstract future, a readiness I can't imagine anyone ever really having, only assuming or pretending that they do.

Though this may be what I tell myself.

He's turned out the lights and so must I now turn off, too.

Near Enough to Burn

There are many things I've started to write in my mind, lately, that never quite made it to any page, paper or otherwise. Feeling more like myself means gathering library books, cooking new things, browsing obsessively for cognac leather boots. I do not want to write about the wedding or the honeymoon, or at least do not want to using those words. It came and blazed and went, and we were elated for it.

I'd like to write about being unable to keep from peeking at the sizes in my mother's blouse, bra and jeans that she left at the reception - not from any illicit activity, but because she helped to decorate and changed into her dress there after wards, accidentally leaving her things for me to gather and ship. She is smaller than I am, in numbers anyway, and I smaller than she in character. She never looked in my diary, after all.

I'd like to write about the false gas fireplace in the second hotel M and I shared, how he turned the television a full ninety degrees so he could sit in front of it, near enough to burn if the flames had been real instead of as far from it as the cotton tatters blown from a plastic Halloween lantern. How this picture of him, his pale body and hairy legs, is the picture of my husband and my greatest delight. His lap did not seem complete without my head in it, his arms empty as anchors dangling without a ship. So I sat with him.

Cheap hotel rooms can really sometimes feel like palaces.

There Is No Try

M offered me Nyquil last night so I could sleep, and tonight I've made precautions of my own: a hot shower, various attempts to combat my hairy ancestry, and the generous scents of honeysuckle and patchouli, in the spirit of Cassandra, moisturizing me. I am hoping to avoid worrying the corners of my pillow with everything that yet needs doing, my groans of frustration and midnight dashes to the computer to write an email or three, to add or check something off of this or that list, stifled or resisted alltogether. There is a cat and a man sleeping in this bed as well as me, after all; shouldn't we all get to have sweet dreams of the wedding being over?

Besides, festivities begin tomorrow and we'll have house guests, too, and I know there's no sense worrying about what's going to happen no matter what I do or do not do.

Maybe that's just the lotion talking.

Affirmative

I said no to myself about many things yesterday, browsing the aisles of two separate stores in search of tablecloths that were neither a) vinyl b) tacky or c) overpriced, given they'll only get one good use, in my reckoning. I filled my baskets - twice - with things I returned to the shelves at the end of my visit. It was rather difficult to say goodbye to a skeletal bride and groom, out of everything, but I did.

So tonight, after having devoted a day to baking some twenty dozen cookies and sampling only a few before committing them to the freezer for the next week, I am going to say yes to pizza and a night of gaming, or yes to pizza and a period film. Perhaps both, but certainly pizza.

M is out being a bachelor, and I'm in playing at spinster.

My Head is Spinning on my Shoulders

I feel like I am holding my breath waiting for this wedding to happen. It is a strange comfort to me that whatever I should do or not do, the day will come and go like every other. It doesn't keep me, of course, from trying to do everything, but I can see at least the futility of my sleeplessness and loss of appetite. Two pounds seems paltry over the course of the month, but given the usual unflinchingly solid state of my body, I cannot help but be surprised.

M put his arms around me today as I carelessly unbuttoned his shirt once he was home from work. Jacuzzis were mentioned, and for a moment we were a week and three days ahead of ourselves, instead of a week and two.

Despite everything that remains to be done, which seems just enough to keep me busy, waiting will be the most trying task.

Laundry Day

The laundromat is like another planet.

I remember running up and down the scummy tile as a child before we had a washer and dryer at home, crawling in and out of the baskets even though I knew I wasn't allowed, fancying the miniature detergents for play instead of purpose. Whatever familiarity I had then is lost now. Even in college I never washed more than a few pairs of jeans in the sterile dormitory basement, the sister place of this suburban wash.

I brought a fistful of coins for no reason, and had to be shown how to use the machine. She was so quick I'm not at all sure it was a lesson; I think she was just doing it for me. It's like I've never laundered anything in my life, sitting here nursing a panic that I should've gone with cold water instead of hot, that white and off-white will find a way to compromise each other.

But I watch our duvet, our down comforter, and our new sheets spin in the foam, and there's something about it that feels a little bit like my mother, for all I haven't kids to beg to sit down or a smoking habit to indulge between loads.

But there, I've seen a scrap of pure white tumbling, and I'm sure I haven't screwed up.

Double Gang

Seated by the fire in a tissue weight turtle neck. The weather is fine enough for both, and storytelling, too. The best ones have more than one teller, our interruptions building each after the other, gestures cast in shadow against patio chairs and pavement. The hiss of old logs are a whispering chorus, the chatter of a restless audience. They weren't there and had to be, I guess.

We bought wine glasses today to toast with at the wedding, and after. It seems like we keep bringing permanent things into the house, though we've lived here now, together, for years. Even white plastic light switch covers seem an improvement, a cozy touch compared with the standards stained with age. On our grocery list M scratched things to buy when we come back from the honeymoon. Perhaps my excitement over light fixtures and ceramic tile is indicative of how old and idle I'm getting.

Though the champagne flutes weren't on sale and we wouldn't pay full price. Maybe we aren't so gentile after all.

Vanity

Like Susan Pevensie, I am regretting being privy to thoughts better left alone. Unlike Susan, it is what I am thinking, and not others, that I wish unthought. Aren't we a nasty character, human woman?

Kicking Rocks

At fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, I wrote like I was sprinting, feverish, trying to purge myself of something. The best part in remembering - if not necessarily in reading the jumbled guts of it, I don't use the word purge without reason - was that I never needed to explain myself. I could skip to writing the good parts, and write them as bloated as I liked. My heroes were grossly indulgent, my heroines conflicted but ultimately without flaw or rival. I didn't need exposition, I had nothing to prove and no one to please but myself and my best friend, who wrote with me. Though we considered ourselves quite different from ever other girl we knew, I know now we weren't alone. Everyone we met in college and loved and became friends with played the same games. We were all each others' trusted confidants on and off the page.

If anything, I'm beginning to think a firm understanding and gross over-usage of cliche is a solid foundation for avoiding it in the future. At least I was mostly spared in Introduction to Creative Writing, though I'm in no hurry to return to those stories, either.

She's Crafty

My original vision for this blog was, if not necessarily a showcase, a process piece for my craft undertakings. I suppose I've reached a stage in public writing where I feel everything should be for something, as opposed to vain little exercises in daily drivel. And though I haven't really used it for that purpose, I'm a sharer by nature, and nothing is so pleasing as having something enjoyed. Which is probably why I found the creative writing workshop a little like a Roman circus.

I love what is handmade. I want to try everything and do, want to skim tutorials so I can get down to it with only enough understanding of the process to fuck up in a small - but eternally noticeable - way. I tell myself I don't have time to work out at the gym/fold laundry/call my mother/get to bed on time because I have projects.

Occasionally, I finish one.

Opalescent

When he buys you a gift, your surprise and pleasure at the act are far better than the gift itself.

Avowing

In one month I will be married. My new means of composing my Mrs. Bennet-esque nerves involve the following considerations.

I will look beautiful on my wedding day, but it will be neither the only nor the last day that I will.

No one will remember - hopefully - my tears over fluorescent lighting, breaches of etiquette, unexpected blemishes, or compromised music selections when I cry at the altar. I will take a hand I have known so well and that has known me, but it will be my husband's hand, and I will be his wife.

This is a day I will share, less than an hour for every month that I have prepared, with my friends and my family. All of the rest of my hours, the months and years of my life, will be spent building something far bigger and more special than a wedding day: my marriage.

I will be neither fearful nor undone by the unexpected, be it cake frosting, trailing hems, or quarrelsome relations, because I never expected love, and it has been the greatest influence of my life.

More Alike Than Unalike

The way the baker wrapped our danish this morning reminded me of having tea in Germany, our breads and pastries folded into the same sort of waxy, printed paper bags. M and I sat in the garden of his extended host family, sampling two kinds of strawberry jams and raving appropriately for each approving grandmother. It was our fourth day with the family, and I'd reached the limit of my understanding of the language within the first half hour of the beginning of our stay. The conversation was like the droning of bees in the heat, but the trees created shade that I was used to, filtered in familiar patterns through hickory and maple and oak leaves. I dozed under their knowing smiles, shifted into alertness now and then by M's chattering sentiments, strange language passing over a tongue I considered myself intimately familiar with.

I'd had enough of my ignorance by then, craved conversation, started fights with M before bed just to animate him in English. When we left I was relieved, but I missed them more each train we boarded going further and further south. I miss them now, the hospitality of strangers.

I would like to tell Gehret someday the words she taught me. I would like to be so kind.

Adrifter

I've become more comfortable talking about writing everyday than I am with the act itself. Is it easier to build with gesture and intention than it is with action? I guess so.

I bought roses in the grocery store and I never realized how much I really admire the flower. The tight little buds have always seemed like a number of things I do not like, pursed lips, mincing steps, Audrey II from Little Shop of Horrors. But two days later they're unfolding: wild, wide bursts of color, fronds of pollen at their stems. I am stuffing my face with them, their scent, the vellum-velvet texture. M takes the time to remind that tomorrow or the day after they'll start to wither and brown, but I don't care. Short lived but lovely is pleasure enough right now.