Checkout is 3pm.

Had an epiphany! A diamond headband with a pixie cut would be hella cute. Just need to find one now. God forbid I mention it or I'll be taken over to DeBeers and held there until I pick something. I don't want something from there. I mean like a Goody Rhinestone one from the drugstore.

In other news, I woke up long enough to page through my favorite Christmas catalogue today and every model made me think of Drunk J Crew.

(I never laughed so hard lately as I did at this website.)

But then I found Caleb's Christmas present for this year. No, not the Maserati. He doesn't love those cars in the same way I don't 'love' DeBeers. I'm getting him THESE.

JESUS CHRIST.

I've been rattling around the house mostly since 5 am (I don't sleep anymore. Why don't I sleep?) and I looked out the window and abruptly it was like someone flipped a switch and the sun rose. Like it was dark as I walked toward the window and I blinked and it was light out.

I wish I could do that at will. I hate the short days so badly

More later. I might be hallucinating and should probably go back to bed.

Small but not quiet.

I can't believe I let myself break down

Every morning now at four I get up, turn on the fireplace and bring my phone and headphones back to the middle of the big bed. I burrow back down between the sleepers and put on music. Mostly I just play Run Free/Moving On/The Road on repeat until I fall asleep again and then when Loch's alarm goes off at six he will quietly lament the need to tether me to him so I'm not wandering around in the dark. It was so easy once with a tiny fifty-six-square-foot space. Not so easy now. Fifty-six hundred feet and then some.

He'll wrap his hand around the back of my head and pull me back in. So warm. Perfect. He'll promise me we'll get new headphones because these ones are broken from waking up lying on them and after snoozing for twenty minutes or so he'll leave me here and go get ready for the day.

I put the headphones back in and press my forehead against Ben's arm until he shifts and spoons with me. He says turn it down and I ignore the request because I can pretend I'm asleep and he doesn't know what a lifetime of sleeping with music on has done to soothe my brain and how much I missed it recently.

He is back to full sleep in seconds anyway. I press repeat another fifty times until my batteries run out and then I get up too.

I used to love the sound of rain when I could hear it finally.

The only thing I'm needing is for you to be bleeding
From my homicidal kiss

It'll be five years this early spring since we moved here. I should be packing. Anything over four years and I start to live on time borrowed from someone else's future. A nice present (and a bad pun) but I always wonder if the cabin fever is some sort of escapist technique I just haven't figured out how to wield properly.

Caleb laughs at this suggestion and provides one of his own, saying he thinks Lochlan managed to impart to me a fairly serious notion that humans don't need roots or stability or familiarity at all and that it was profoundly damaging in adulthood, proper.

I remind him not to be disparaging and he dismisses his words as normal thoughts, unchecked. No filter, as he promised to be as forthright as I always am. I walk in the door, unload my anxiety all over you and then wear your mental picture of my transparency as a frame around my fragile bones. I don't do it on purpose, this is just what has become of me.

He asks how we, all together, would start over yet again, somewhere else and I tell him,

Leave that to me. Just pick some place where it never rains but I'm still on the beach. Okay?

The lady who pinned my poppy on me this year is a genius. It's still on there. She threaded the tip back up through the poppy itself. It's not going anywhere, and my hand is all poked to bits from trying to adjust my seatbelt strap under my coat collar. I'm not complaining though. Usually I lose them within minutes.

Sam had someone else pin his and as such, lost it within minutes.

He's getting so excited. Matt comes home next Saturday for good. The work thing is done. Matt was on Skype with us and August and Duncan (home in less than three weeks) and everyone else too and it was amazing yesterday.

Til I ruined it by crying and asking August to come back.

But you know. I cry every time I see him. It's not him though. It's me.

Good morning (my archives, they're up now. Go read all about Jake while I lie here and die.)

Life goes on here. I'm not quite up to a big birthday dinner tonight for Jake but maybe later this weekend.

I had a massive change of heart. I reuploaded all of the missing archives. All of Jacob, from the day I left Cole right through to marrying Ben and then walking away from my blog. Two year's worth of entries, April 2006 through April 2008 (when I left for four months and then was convinced to come back) is up now and available for your reading pleasure.

I'll apologize in advance for the liberal amounts of romantic cheese at the start. Jake was like that.

But he's gone now and it serves no purpose to shove his memories in some dark corner. If they were in direct sunlight, perhaps they might fade a little faster so I can thrive a little here too. He wasn't magic and it took seeing it all again to understand that.

Maybe Sam was right.

I'm not going to die though. I feel a little braver than I expected to at this point. It's been seven years today. Happy forty-fourth, Pooh.

Christmas? MADE.

Ultra Snobby Sugar Daddies of West Van.

(I'm so cranky today.)

The news out today seems to be the new Star Wars title (The Force something I forgot) and the fact that yeah, they did go ahead and make a second episode of Ultra Rich Asian Girls of Vancouver. I'm not a Star Wars person, as such. I'm really not. I don't get the hype. I think it's cheesy and poorly written and frankly some people, once you reach a certain age, develop a thirst for nostalgia that rarely matches the quality of the thing you are waxing about.

URAGV on the other hand, well it's just delightful. Probably wouldn't be if the episodes ran longer than fifteen minutes each but it's hilariously pointless. Poorly directed, stereotypical and also weirdly sweet. There's no purpose other than today I learned that Chanel put out a line of purses called Boy.

Not sure I'm missing out on fashion. They also put out a line of QUILTED FUCKING MILK CARTONS. I think fashionistas are being punked, is what I think but whatever. I'll be a Coach girl on my deathbed. Only the leather ones though. And yeah, I love Snoopy but I don't want a Coach Snoopy handbag because I'm not twelve. Well, I am but twelve-year-olds don't carry $400 handbags.

Maybe the Ultra Rich ones do.

My favorite handbag of ALL time was a burgundy vinyl mini-backpack from Bentley. I carried it from age fifteen to twenty-two and then it broke. I wasn't Ultra Rich though. Probably the opposite which is why I was so blissfully happy today to find petite Rider Jeans at Wal-Mart of all places because sometimes that's where I go. They fit so good. You don't know what it's like to buy short or 28" minimum inseam jeans only to come home and discover there is still an extra eighty-five inches of fabric after your toes stop to still deal with.

Caleb frowned and asked if I needed jeans made. I told him quite loudly and slowly that I. just. found. a. bunch. at. Wal-Mart. and looked at him with huge eyes.

He physically winced.

I should see if they want to make a show about him.

Gravy train.

Is it sick of me
To feed the animal in you
Is it sick to say
I tease the hunter like I do
Is it sick of me
To watch the wicked way you thrill
Is it sick to say
That I live to break your will

Ben took me Christmas shopping this morning. We got wrapping paper, ribbons, some LED light garlands for the mantle and a few books to add to what we already have to send home to the grandparents. All of the grandparents. I shop all year round but yes, I'm going to be the first person to remind you Christmas is now fifty days away.

Jacob's birthday is two days away. Ben's is less than a month! He won't tell me what he wants and I don't know what to get him. This is nothing new. I should get him some sort of silver teething ring. In the grocery store this morning when we were picking up a few odds and ends he ripped the top off an envelope of powdered gravy and stuck his tongue inside and then made the worst face I've ever seen.

He then opened a container of chocolate milk and drank half of it in the aisle. We got a really big frown from an older lady and I got cross and told her we planned to pay for it. He took the jug away from his face and gave her his best Kurgan laugh.

Gosh, Ben can look so scary sometimes doing this stuff. Part of me wishes he could have a little more self-control and the rest of me eggs him on because if you can't have fun while you're living then you're never going to have any fun at all.

Ben and I were like this together before death happened to us.

It's sometimes really nice to know we can still be silly. Or creepy. Or just weird.

He said we can get a cake for Jake's birthday if I want. I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking it's a great idea and also a terrible idea and I should probably run it by Sam or Joel or...or...it's just cake and cake is pretty much the point of life, isn't it?

It's not?

(Seriously?)

Easy answers/no easy answers.

He's covering it over by telling them that his point was that in spite of testing or margins of error or percentage matches, he would still have stepped in to take care of his brother's family no matter what. But don't worry, we used the best labs. Tests don't lie. Those percentages can't be called in question. They're simply too high.

I stood behind the door and rolled my eyes because the nobility of it all slays me. No, actually it doesn't. What slays me is how easily the rhetoric pours out of his mouth like black tar, coating everyone in a slow reassuring ooze. They buy it. They buy it with lingering silent doubts but they still buy it overall.

***

What do you want for Christmas?

Levi 501s in my size. 

Ah, the endless search for jeans that fit properly. What else?

The Justin Trudeau book. 

And?

Um..

Someone needs to teach you how to be a girl. Every other female on earth keeps a ten-page list. What have you always wanted?

A rear-wheel drive car I can drift in!

I give up.