&c.

there's this guy i work with -- "this guy" because it's weird to call him a man, even though that is what he is and he is that, you know?, but he's a little too much of a guy to be a man -- anyway, this guy i work with who, i realized today, smells faintly of stale cigarettes in a way that i have never smelled stale cigarettes before. it's not even, like, an actual cigarette smell that i smelled when he came to my desk to show me illustrations that are "fucking awesome" and needed to be inserted between the correct pages of a manuscript, even though i knew he'd just gone out for a smoke in the half-covered pseudo-wind-tunnel thing we have outside our door.

like cigarettes and snow. and if not snow, then that deep winter chill that accumulates between glass buildings and concrete when the rest of the world is snowed on and new york is just left to exist, always moving, always breathtaking, never beautiful.

i thought, really, that i had really felt alone before. i also thought i was done with that. feeling alone, i mean. (not lonely. alone.) only recently have i become aware of a gnawing pain, in every inch of my body, making me cold and hungry and listless and detached. not sad so much as done. with whatever i have to be done with, i guess. (not life, i don't mean that. i don't know what i mean. just an abstract sense of "thisness" that i really can't define.)

all this is is twelve minutes of silence. that's what it boils down to. (but doesn't it always? isn't that inevitable? am i wrong for being almost relieved instead of surprised or disappointed?)

i wish i had a penguin in a suit.

Spotted.

Yesterday, I helped my mother look for a dress.
("Where'd she lose it?" Ha! Ha! I'm sorry, I disgust myself sometimes.)
I don't wear dresses much these days, but I know enough about them, and enough about my mother, to earn my keep.
(I wasn't getting paid. I don't know what that says about my keep.)
She says I have good taste.
"Yes, well, sometimes," I say.
From across the room, we both see it:
A little peach number, coquettishly rendered in gathered hammered silk.
Absolutely exquisite.
She digs it.
I do too.
But when she examines the back, her face drops, drops like she just found out that Santa Claus and Love and A Cure For The Common Cold, none of them exist.
Because it's the sheerest pale pink organza, on which a handful of crystals has been scattered with the care and expertise of a gambler's toss.
"You can see right through it," she says, crestfallen.
"And?"
"My freckles..."
For those of you who don't know (which should be all of you, and correct me if I'm wrong, here), my mother's back is covered in the most wonderful, wonderful collection of freckles and birthmarks and beauty marks and moles.
Those freckles are the very reason that I thought the dress was perfect.
"...everyone will see them."
"That's exactly why it'll look so beautiful, Mom."

***

I'm at the doctor's office a lot these days.
Like last week, for instance.
I was wearing a dress, for once.
This one was scandalously open in the back, and blue, and made of paper.
Courtesy of the doctor.
I didn't think that we were at the gift-giving stage of our relationship yet, but those in the medical profession tend to move fast, I've heard.
On my back, her hands were small, like mine. Cold, like mine, too.
"Have you ever gotten these freckles checked out?"
"No."
"You should."
"Okay."
"Does skin cancer run in your family?"
"No, but my mom has a bunch of moles like these."
"On her back?"
"Everywhere."
"Ah ha. See a dermatologist."
"Will do."
And she was concerned, because, when she sees freckles, she sees potentially cancerous blemishes.
But when I see them, I see every woman on my mom's side of the family.

I guess you could say that I've got my mother's back.
Oh.
Oh!
Yes. I've got my mother's back.

Advent-Age-Us/Advantageous.

First:

I'm not known for having dimples, and yet, I've got one anyway.
Just one, to the left of my smile.
Or to the right, if you're looking at me and doing something to make me smile, I guess.

Second:

On the train, I sat across from someone.
I was about to refer to the rosary she was holding, but that wasn't her - that was the Polish woman who shared a bench with me in the park about a month ago.
This woman was nothing like that woman.
My mix-up, therefore, seems fairly unwarranted.
I probably thought that she was the one with the rosary beads because she was reading a Bible, and sometimes, but not always, the people with Bibles are the same people as the people with rosaries.
(If some people have rosaries, and all people with rosaries have Bibles, then it can be said that...)
Let's say this:
She didn't have a rosary.
Just a Bible.
I mean, she had other things too, I guess, in that bag of hers, or on her person, perhaps, but if we're examining her possessions in the vacuum of religious paraphernalia, let's just say that all she had was a Bible.
(But what do we know? Maybe she had a wallet-size photo of her aunt somewhere in that bag, and her aunt is a nun, or was a nun, at least, before she died. But is that religious paraphernalia, or familial paraphernalia? And so what if she died, she's still a nun, right?)
You know, maybe she wasn't reading it at all.
Maybe she was just looking at it while thinking about what she had had for lunch or what she would be having for dinner or maybe the fact that she needed to buy saran wrap, but her eyes scanned the pages pretty convincingly, so I'll say she was reading.
I reached into my own bag to pull out a book.
I tried to be subtle about it.
I didn't want her to look up.
I didn't want to interrupt her Bible-reading (pseudo or otherwise.)
But she did, prompted, presumably, by the sound of my rummaging.
(I never could keep quiet about some things.)
She smiled at me.
(Shit!)
I smiled back.
(One dimple.)
Then, still smiling, she glanced at the reading material I'd brought.
(I like to think she hoped that it would be a Bible.)
No such luck.
("Lesbian Pulp Fiction Of The 1950s.")
She stopped smiling and returned to her book, and I'm going to call it a book and not "the Bible," just to see how it feels.
(Weird, that's how.)
Trains, it would seem, are really just chapels on tracks.

Third:

Purple, Purple, Pink, Purple. That's how the candles go.