I love the time and in between
the calm inside me
in the space where I can breathe
I believe there is a
distance I have wandered...

-Elsewhere
Sarah Mclachlan
 

I miss waking up. The dark velvet comforter wrapped under my chin, burying me softly and completely as the snow buries the gables of the hotel and the bricks of the windowsill : sensation of security, of peace, of a little brown mouse burrowed deep into a nest of cotton and wool. In the silence before the morning came to consciousness, it was easy to believe that I was even smaller than the mouse, that the room and I had been shrunk down to figures in a crystal globe. Everything was complete-- the blue and cream striped wallpaper, the charcoal sketch of St. Peter's cathedral hanging by the mirror, the rebellious heap of chiffon at the foot of the bed where my dress slid off the hanger during the night-- only in miniscule. Even the little Christmas tree was perfectly preserved, a flourish of greenery and red satin and gold beads balanced precariously in a teapot on the dresser. (I lacked a proper container and personally never cared much for the beverage customs of the country in the first place. In that respect I remained an unabashed Yank.)

I miss the moments after waking up, when your eyes are not open but they are not shut, when they are something in between. They are cracked down the middle or at the corners, allowing one, two, three stray beams of light to float into view. Gray. Pale gold. Watercolor blue. I knew it was Christmas morning just by the colors, but perhaps this recognition attached more closely to the echoes of church bells in then distance. Bells singing over snow-- a distinctly London sound I will always hear in the back of my mind when I am alone in a room. The city becomes part of you that way, and you become part of it; then when you tried to leave it follows you, but only because you have left something of yourself there. You've left it sitting in your room, beside the bed, like a piece of luggage you meticulously packed then forgot.

I miss the view from the window, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes : a parade of rooftops, stiff and formal in their powdered snow wigs with the affectation suited to any English noble. A thousand furnished rooms, Eliot said. One could see where he got the idea of it. I used to linger in bed, watching the houses and imagining how each of the rooms were furnished, who lived in them, and what they were doing at that moment. A child sleeping with a favorite doll, a man drinking a tumbler of cognac before work, a woman painting her mouth with red before a cracked bathroom mirror, a wife rolling over to wrap her arms around her husband and tell him to turn off the alarm clock for just ten more minutes. By the time the week was over, I felt I knew them all quite personally. I had filled in the blanks of their lives and love and all the petty inconsistencies in-between. Of course I intended to write it all down when I returned home, perhaps in a book, perhaps in a poem, but after I left the city the images faded. Magic has a pesky habit of disappearing on you once you try to take it back to reality, and I do admit I resented that. It left me with the feeling that they had all moved and no one had bothered to tell me of new addresses or phone numbers. In time I forgave them, but still wonder on occasion what they are doing, if someone else has picked them up and is creating new and different lives for them. What will that other person see that I missed? What will they forget that I remember?

I miss the knock on the door, his face framed with a wreath of steam from two dark blue ceramic mugs. Hot chocolate for both of us, heavy on the marshmallows because drinking coffee meant we were responsible adults and who wants to be responsible on Christmas morning? We wanted youth, chubby-faced, energetic; we wanted to tear down stairs in flannel pajamas and tear wrapping paper, little spaniels set on a pile of bones. We wanted to be reckless. At least we had kept the flannel pajamas, though it was a good bet there would a substantial of paper carnage as well before the morning was over.

(Look at you,) I grinned. (Father Christmas himself....)
(Father Christmas? I'm shocked. I'd think you'd have come up with a more non-gender term of holiday cheer.
Didn't you hear? I'm in England now. They're turning me into a traditionalist.
Heaven help tradition.
Happy Kwanza, then. Satisfied?
Perfectly. Happy Hanukkah to you too.
You'd never make it as a Jew. You couldn't last two weeks on a kosher diet.
And you, darlin, can't be English. You don't drink tea.
Shut up and give me the mug, Mr. Can-I-have-a-Molson-instead.
Keep this up and I'm going to make you wait until after dinner for your present.
Try it and your room will be ransacked my noon.
Just spare the sock drawer. Not even Magneto would come between a man and clean socks.
Worse than that, babe. I'm going for your toothbrush.
You wouldn't dare.
Try me.
I'd steal your girly Prada gloves. The leather ones you dropped two hundred for on Conduit Street. I'd throw them in the Thames.
Then we'd be swimming on Christmas, wouldn't we?
They do that in Hyde Park, you know. I'd be happy to hold your clothes for you while you tried to rescue your waterlogged accessories. You'd be kinda cute as a human icicle.
I'd drip all over your bed linens and clean clothes. I'd be ruthless.
Ok, ok, truce. Merry Christmas, kid.
Merry Christmas, old man.)

Little conversations like that seemed to last for hours but the entire week passed within a space of five minutes. In looking back I recognize the fault : I tried to stretch the time, pull and tug at each minute until it took forever, but time is like a rubber band. You can only stretch it so much before it snaps and flies across the room. You can't even see where it has gone, it moves that fast. In retrospect, I miss it all. Even the complications-- the lack of heat in the floorboards, the overpriced cab fares, the soot that clung to your shoes after you walked the downtown streets, the pretensions of the very wealthy and the very British. Even the sadness-- the hitch in my throat when I shut the blinds to the window and walked out of the room for the final time, leaving the velvet bed and the striped wallpaper to the next magic-seeker. Even the goodbyes-- the clerk at the front desk who let me call home free of charge because it was Christmas morning; the old security guard who always tipped me off to the best restaurants in town and insisted to hold the door every time I entered the building, even though Logan growled at him for it. Nostalgia colors it all, soft pastel like the hand-tinted photograph of my grandmother as a girl.

But, if in the end I had to measure it all up, weigh it all out, the thing I miss the most is my return to London.

You can't go back to a place you've never been.

You can't remember things that haven't happened yet. You see them, for a while-- like the people in Eliot's furnished rooms, you see every detail, every color-- but inevitably they dissolve in the clamor of reality. One by one they fall : clogged up in traffic jams, wandering lost down streets naked of snow, knocking in futility at churches where no bells ring, not even on Christmas. Like fairies, they die the moment they are not believed. They fade, they shimmer and vanish.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you can bring them back by clapping. Sometimes-- when I sit alone in a room, when I catch him looking at me out of the corner of his eye-- the back of my mind tingles with the echoes of bells over London that I have never heard.
 

the end.

that was dangerously fun. The Muse and I would love to hear your opinion of our trip to the lighter side. Shall we continue with the foofiness? Cease and desist? Don't worry, my angst muse is still alive and well...just biding her time ::evil grin::

Any questions, comments, or Cage-Fighter Logan clones are welcome at clone347@aol.com where they will be worshipped daily with love and incense. Especially the Logan clones.
:)

thanX for reading
darkstar