Being back home alone and sad in my teenaged bedroom feels familiar. There's a king-sized bed now instead of my twin mattress with the Ikea princess netting I loved. My mom has put up some icicle lights, apparently in homage to the holiday rainbow lights I strung along my girlhood bedroom. She has also put up some teaching-wine-friendship message text decor, apparently in homage to some friends who have given her ill-suited gifts she must display somewhere for politeness, but doesn't wish to see.
The flowers I hung to dry are still on the wall, and most of them are ancient and diseccated, leftover from when I worked at the coffee shop in high school. There was a florist in the shop next door, Rosemary, whose name sounded too good to be real and was. It turned out she was using an alias and ended up in jail for the financial crimes her florist business was actually a front for. Oh, but whoever she was, she knew I was 17 and loved receiving flowers. I gave her free coffee because there was no one to tell me not to. A NoVa love story if I ever heard one. Rosemary, if you can hear me, I'm coming.
Just kidding.
One miracle is that I located one of my mom's nice, crystal wine glasses brought up by a drunken and miserable me over last Christmas and left carelessly in a corner of the room behind a lamp. It still has my name on it, scrawled in the silver wine pen I bought my mom for her stocking. (Santa did, I mean.) I like to see it: my own name in my own handwriting.
The glass was overlooked but my mom had helpfully placed other forgotten things from that visit in my room - specifically, the festive, expensive port I had bought and brought when I had envisioned a different Christmas than the one we ended up having.
I stay up all night reading Calvin and Hobbes and drinking the failed Christmas port.
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