Well last year I had finished the novel and made a Thanksgiving Dinner. This year no.
I need to move. I do. I really do. Hopefully I will be able to. It’s so cold out. Bright clear cold, everything in high relief. Winter is not my season. Summer is. And Spring.
Anyway I was remembering all the Thanksgivings yesterday. We went to a restaurant — not one of our usual picks — and it was weird. I had swordfish — which isn’t even a Thanksgiving thing to begin with.
Usually I can whip that dinner out so easily. I like the scent of the pies and the other things. I guess I could do one this weekend if I felt like it. Dunno. Scattered like the windfallen leaves this year. There is this whole part of me that for years tried to hold it all together for everyone and it was difficult at best. Nobody got along on holidays — it was the two mothers that made it a living hell. They really did.
I love to cook. But I am not in the mood to here, anymore. I am a very social person, actually. He is not. I want parties. He never has. It has just squelched almost all of me. Like a compression chamber. In my own place I would do that. All the time. Things would be fun and festive and loud and happy. What he does is say “the music is too loud.”
He has crimped my style for YEARS. Years and years and years. I don’t know why I stayed so long. I had to because of convention, I guess. I love him but there is more out there. So much more.
In the last few years I’ve thought a lot about family systems as a therapist. In some systems a particular emotion is not allowed. Like too much joy, or too much sadness. Here emotion is chaste and cold. It is classic to the WASP tradition. Centuries of that. I myself have a Latin temperament. More like southern France and Italy. I am “warm” in tone. I like that about myself, too.
This holiday is les miserables, no kidding. It’s because I don’t want to live here. I really don’t and I don’t know how to get out except by selling a book or something I have done. All these rooms in the house and nowhere is my own. Not even one of them. I am so sick of it.
Holding onto hope and bright light. I am. Also, I never want to have swordfish and strawberry cream pie on Thanksgiving ever again. Wrong restaurant, entirely. It was one of those aimless moments. Uncertain destination without reservations with him. There have been many like that. Yesterday was that, again.
I guess I could say it was my fault? I could have made the dinner. I didn’t want to. I was feeling very sad about my family and the fact that I no longer have one.
Away from here will be a sigh of relief. The first thing I will do is play music and dance. Hugely.
VALENTINE BONNAIRE - WRITER 