November

[mnemosyne]

Serafíne does not get out much during the month of November. Days slide into weeks and she spends them very much at home. The sun sets earlier every night and the lights in the windows burn brighter and there is a family two blocks away that has had their Christmas lights up for a week and a half now and another apartment full of barista-writers and Macy's-clerk-musicians and bearded bloggers just three houses down from her own rambling house has responded with their own display, which is different from the first because it is consciously done, because it is ironic.

The strange thing is: in the dark, all one sees is the blaze of light.

The windows are dark, or shine with painted reflections that take on a different cast as the world turns to darkness and cold creeps in and snow begins to fall. Sometimes the sharp, clean smell of woodsmoke in the air overcomes the decidous, sticky musk of marijuana. Starbucks is sneaking seasonal singer-songwriter jams into their holiday mix and The Empty Glass had a local mandolin/cello duo doing a folk-punk version of Handel's Messiah - the Christmas bits, he shall reign for ever and ever, all that glory stuff, the crown of gold not the crown of thorns - and Tin Soldiers now features A Very New Wave Christmas every other day. Thaddeus, the coolest of the clerks, has taken to thumbing past Christmas at K-Mart, but Amanda always listens to it twice.

Sera does not get out much. Her housemates are okay with that. In some ways, it is like one long, extended hangover. Dan fixes her breakfast every morning, or more properly, every afternoon, coffee and eggs and bacon and roasted potatoes, or maybe sweet potato hash, or rum-scented French toast with sautéed bananas and then a pot of her favorite Darjeeling to get her through the day. Sometimes she spikes it with whiskey. Mostly she doesn't. Dee brings home Sera's favorite pain chocolat essentially every day and with all that food in the house Dee and Dan and Rick gain as much weight as Sera, who so desperately needs some flesh on her bones, maybe more. Sera thinks the few extra pounds look great on Dee but Dee is self-conscious, pricklingly aware of her tighter fitting clothes and also, trying very hard not to be.

They stay in more than they go out and you'd think, given that they are now and then a band, which on some occasions appears to have a name even if no one is entirely certain what it is right now, that they might jam a bit. They don't. Sera does not sing and she does not scrawl half-remembered ideas-of-lyrics in her leather-bound journal and she does not talk about chords or progressions thereof, or rhythm, or bridges, or hooks. Hawksley comes by, sometimes. They sit in the garden with a fire kindled in the chiminea, wrapped in blankets in the sharp, clear, wintry air. Sera likes the cut of cold against her skin. Sometimes she smokes a clove cigarette, the spice and smoke swirling up to join the gray sky all clotted with clouds. Sometimes she smokes a joint; half-a-joint, shares it thoughtlessly and allows the afternoon to drift away. Sometimes she kisses him,

but not the way she used to.

There's one night when someone - not Dan or Dee or even Hawksley, so it must have been a rather well-intentioned Rick - urges her and urges her to come out, paint the city, you know, all the colors of her dreams and Sera gives in and she drinks the way she drinks and gets drunk, sorority-pledge drunk rather than Sera-drunk, meaningless blackout drunk, we really should call the EMTs drunk, except Dan can't do that to her, not when he knows what he knows about her, so he sits with her on the cold white subway tiles of her bathroom floor while she flails between the tub and the toilet and helps her puke, holds her up, when the brace of her trembling arms on the porcelain fails and cradles her against his chest and stays awake and wakes her on the regular, staywithme staywithme staywithme.
After that night, everyone's pretty okay with staying in.

Sera doesn't seem troubled, precisely. Maybe just remote, as if there are so many sharp edges inside her she has to wrap herself in cotton wool. Her smiles are still and maybe a bit sad and sure, a bit more rare, but they come easily for the people she loves, for the small pleasures of her life, and there are so many.

At night though, and only at night, when the house is quiet, and the lights are out, and the city is sleeping - every night when she crawls into the center of her deliciously warm and perfectly safe bed, Sera cannot stop shaking, no matter how much she wills it, these deep, wracking, involuntary shudders that she cannot stave off and must simply endure. Some nights, the spells pass within five minutes, or ten, and she falls quietly into the nigh imperturable depths of her sleep. Some nights, they last,

for hours,

and hours,

and hours.

[Meant this to be longer and have way more in my head to add to it, but was not getting anymore done so. This is Sera's November. ]