It's been a month, but what a month!
I bought cut flowers this week, from Trader Joe's, the first I've had since I moved to New York. I remember one time, I was bringing home some white roses home with me, and a young man in the mews near my house said, "Someone as pretty as you should have someone else buy her flowers!" I snarled at him, and he backed off, unsmiling. Back home in London, I bought flowers fortnightly more or less, back when I lived alone in my little bijou east London flat. I miss that flat, and until I sliced the ends of the flowers over the kitchen sink a few nights ago, before arranging them into my plain glass IKEA vase filled with plant food, I didn't realise I missed cut flowers too.
The urge to buy something pretty was strong in me last week; the night of the US election, when I wandered around the East Village, looking for hot election action (I found only a little, in a bar, and left after a few interviews, because I felt in my bones that Hillary was not going to do it this time). When the hum of disquiet became super loud in my head, I ducked into a store and bought some nice skincare, and some perfume. The perfume is sea salt and sage and beechwood, and smells clean, like a nice southern English beach after a quick and hard rain. A comforting scent that's also kind of chic: like if a baby were to wear a black velvet onesie. I held the bottles in my hands and I exhaled, and I can't lie, I felt a little better.
The flowers have begun their slide into droopy death. Until they give up the ghost completely however, I'm going to look at them (purplish red and green and orange) and enjoy them for every hour they're in my presence.
I'm turning 34 this week, and look, I might as well be honest – this is the best I've ever looked and felt in my body. I love my friends and family, and I love my job; I think this may be the purplest patch my writing has ever been in. My mum's excellent cheekbones continue to mark their territory on my face, and it is weird but amazing to watch their progress. Like my mum, they turned up and took over without explanation, and as I am now more myself than I have ever been, I just let them because it's what mum would want. (Amazingly, she cannot see how my face has changed to accommodate her genes over the last few years.)
What else, let's see: I have not mastered a winged eyeliner, but I have never been better at it than this last year. I body brush every day and exfoliate twice a week, and I can see the fruits of this. My foolish undercut is growing in. I have finally discovered NARS matte lip crayon in Dragon Girl, and my lips will *Angelica Schuyler voice* NEVER BE THE SAME. I have come to be realisation that barring a real motherfucking shocker, my legs will probably remain my best feature until the day I shuffle off this mortal coil, and I am A-OK with that. Bottom line: There is time for a lot to go wrong, and my only hope and prayer for the year—and years!—ahead is that I am of sound mind and body when the time comes to face those challenges. I have found myself turning to a prayer my mum used to murmur or shout, as the mood took her: May God meet you at he point of your need.
Roll on, 34th year. I feel very ready.
I have semi-decided that crochet braids are going to be my look for 2017. It feels good to make plans right now, as though the simple act of looking forward is powerful enough to keep badness at bay. I want it written down somewhere, in the same way that my moving to this city was written down (dependent on a visa, obvs) somewhere. In the same way that the Obama family will be moving out of the White House in the weeks to come, and the Trumps will be moving in. I thought a lot about what plans Michelle Obama must have begun to make in the last year or so: is she fielding calls about what her post D.C. job will be? Do they run a course, maybe a month-long one, to re-acclimatise presidential families to everyday civilian life? How do Sasha and Malia feel about leaving? Will the dogs get used to having substantially less room to run about in? Don't despair, dogs!
I looked very closely at Barack Obama's face when he met with his successor and for a moment I thought I saw stark despair. He looked like a man who had made a deal with a mercurial warlord who had then mysteriously reneged at the final hour. No explanation, no apology. It could be that I was projecting wildly, though. Could be.
The day after the election, I received a thin envelope in the mail at work. It was my social security card (it's so flimsy-looking!) I had been waiting for it for a month, and now it was here. Just in time to take a fuller part in Trump's America.