"What makes you think I'm enjoying being led to the flood?"

Runaway - The National

I've been less careful these days. About where my fingertips lie and who's direction I breathe quiet, secret words to and which way I end up not taking.

These days, everything suddenly needs its own share of fanfare at a precise, immediate time. I've been accommodating to that demand rather too eagerly for my usual distaste for rapidness.

Especially this holiday, since I've always been so concretely definite about the fact that holidays should be a tamed version of the normal; slowed to a graceful crawl so that the usual fleet would seem like it's going at a comic speed.

Everyone else still subjected to the day-to-day hysteria end up being a source of your own amusement, as you treat their panic as your own indulgence. It is all rather sadistic, but we all have choices, and they chose to move that fast.

I seem to have missed the whole idea of a lull. Which is incredibly apparent in my submission to things bigger than myself this holiday. It might be thanks to an infinite terror of being still, and in that haste I have been blind to how small a plate I had.

All I ask for are my solo tea parties, whole afternoons with nothing but tissue and wire, hot clouds of the smell of vanilla and bread and everything in a seductively sedate pace.

There is nobody to race this month, I don't need to tell myself to breathe just so I would, and it's still day when I come home.

Now for the finer things.