Some things aren't true until you say them...

12.31.2008 - 2:12 p.m.

It's morning, or what counts as morning, on the last day of a shitty year. And perhaps that's the cause of the black mood I woke up in; that, or the fact that I'd been up entirely too late for civilized life, or the fact that the wind had been howling against the siding ever since the sun started intruding through the bedroom blinds.

We had decided to clean house before heading north for a party, and despite my work on the kitchen the day before, it desperately needed it. But I was so not in the mood, so anchored to my listlessness that it was all I could do to poke at the computer desk while my husband knocked around downstairs. He finally came up and more or less ordered me to stop, to just put back a lamp I'd moved to another room to light a christmas craft project.

So I took the lamp, with bad grace, as I wrestled between the original black mood and the new guilty one that believed I should be a better person than to let him clean alone, back to the guest room. To plug it in, all I had to do was shift some display shelves with his pottery on it and snake my arm behind a wardrobe that was still cockeyed from my original unplugging the other week.

I took hold of the pottery shelf the same way I had before, scooting it outward from the wall, but the bad mood had taken my grace; the carpet grabbed it, and a piece fell from the top shelf and shattered along with my composure, which spewed from my mouth in a rage-filled profanity.

The husband called up to ask if I was okay, and I said yes, but your blue pottery thing isn't, and I'm sorry, and I was already picking up the pieces when he got there to tell me not to worry about it and that I should definitely quit working now. I just said okay, yes, okay.

Except that now there was shattered pottery all over the carpet and behind the wardrobe, so when he headed back downstairs I picked it up. The inside of the bowl had been prettier than I'd noticed before. And I still had to plug in the stupid lamp, which I did too. Then I put a hand on the floor to push myself up, over a knife-edged sliver I'd overlooked. Which cut the holy fuck out of the pad at the base of my index finger.

The hall bathroom sink looks like a murder scene now, it bled through two bandaids even under compression, until I was seconds from deciding to go get stitches, and now it's throbbing dully, daring me to try typing with all ten fingers. I just want to go back to bed.

Fuck you, 2008. I am done.

-stonebridge

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