mostly nonsense

CCXLII.

(from a 1995 Panasonic digital video)

The only people I love these days are family

I cheer whenever the faces of the bells turn back towards us. The teenagers have run off to find their red-faced counterparts in jerseys, the middle aged couples have tucked in for casual conversation and hot cocoa. I am loud enough for us all. My brother smirks behind brass beneath a brightly colored plume. I think maybe on this planet he is the only person I would die for. The faces turn away.

My father wants to drive a snow plow, but he doesn’t like the cold. He needs ten hours of sleep a night and a snack every forty-five minutes. He should go back to selling furs, keep safe and warm. His face is too eager to hear these things, and we keep walking.

For my seventeenth birthday, my mother gives me a print. “There has never been a day when I have not been proud of you, I said to my daughter, though some days I’m louder about other stuff so it’s easy to miss that”. I’ve kept it on four different desks. Sometimes I miss being a failure because she’d never loved me harder.

Some things are lost to time, but that won’t stop me from trying. We watch The Lion King on repeat

The first cold night of October, I lower the volume on Joan Rivers until she could be telling the story of my father’s birth. I smoke a cigarette in the parking lot behind my building. In my room, a prayer book I drew in when I was three, and tucked between two pages of the Haggadah, a photo from that day - my grandmother has one arm wrapped around me and the other outstretched to keep the cigarette as far from my face as she can without putting it down.

I won’t smoke again. Some things are lost to time.