Happy Seasonal Depression

The bells will be ringing, another year laying its head somberly upon my shoulder. A new aged swan song, a midlife crisis, a bell tolling at night, curfew, curfew of your life.

We went to that sushi place, you and I, in the basement of the courthouse. Not the most bourgeois place we've been to but certainly the most pretentious. We sat by the glass window that gave us a beautiful view of the tawdry hallway where lawyers would traipse up and down in Calvin Klein feeling that divine sense of power as they toddle off to another trivial trial. It was so cute it dripped off one's sweet tooth, painfully inane. That was the most complicated day of my life, the day you were so wholly alive that I knew it would never, ever last. Nothing would ever be as good as this moment, the moment on the other side of the glass, looking in on myself with you. 

I hate the movies. They lie, oh they are a ruse, propaganda machines, utterly, abominably cruel. They make us believe we can be anything we dream. This is inhumane and presumptuous. I'm a pedant but they're impossible. I can't keep blindly believing like this, oh God. Une femme est une femme but a sinner is a sinner, at least that's what the woman in the shawl and brown lipstick screamed at me from under the marquee lights.

I was tough. I sneered. I wore brown leather and jeered.

I was soft. Once, oh but once, I was as soft as the dusk that melts behind the hazy mountains and black evergreens. Oh but once.  

Now I don't know what I am. I'm stuck in the middle, like that song--less blood but more brood. You'll find me under the fog of twinkle lights, in a red scarf and a smoky eye, thinking vainglorious thoughts like burning a copy of Byron with a rose gold lighter. They call me the woman of the lighthouse, mother watcher, I simply wait at beck and call, beacon calling, calling out from the smoke of a dark cafe, where jazz plays to caress St. Nick, and the naughty find it nice, just nice. They coddle one another, house keys around their necks like trophies, but I digress before I ingest copious amounts of transgressions. They tell me to move away from the glass, the cold snap will get me even among all this fiery body heat. But the woman on the other side knows so much, and I have so little time to learn it all.