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Show CHRYSALIS PAGE 50 I love you so much. I am sorry for you, for the boys, for myself, for the whole damn world. But I am not part of the world. (Somewhere out there it must be Christmas. There is a Christmas tree and snow, and Remy sings "Jingle Bells.") I am separate. Christmas does not concern me this year. I munch a soda cracker and float away on the soft sandalwood air, a million miles away, ten million miles away from the familiar. It is such an easy thing. Memory is the real narcotic. A scene from another Christmas turns continuously in my head: it is the first Christmas Mark and I spend together. The silver icicles I have been hanging on the tree slip through my fingers onto the floor. I let them lie there. Mark kisses ray neck, pushing me gently down upon the floor under the shining tree. He opens my blouse. The shadows of the lights blinking across the ceiling and walls are red and black and gold, like stained glass. It is as though we lie in the center of a giant, pulsing throat, reflected in the concave bottoms of glass bells, in the convex bottoms of glass birds. It is very cold because they have shut off our gas, but we glow like the lights while the phonograph goes round and round with carols sung by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. That Christmas I was unimaginably pregnant with Remy, and didn't know |