Kerry Says

Leo Traits

The One Hand:

• Generous and warmhearted
• Creative and enthusiastic
• Broad-minded and expansive
• Faithful and loving

The Other Hand:

• Pompous and patronizing
• Bossy and interfering
• Dogmatic and intolerant

Her cotton skirt, thin and rain soaked, slapped wetly against her thighs as she walked. The feeling was both uncomfortable and enjoyable. An accurate definition of sensuality, hers anyway, she thought before determining the side of the road was not the most appropriate place to be thinking such things.

There was something of the amateur-erotic about her present state though. Her T-shirt transparent now and looking like she had poured it on, her hair blown free of its braid, the water streaked mascara and high colour on her cheeks.

“I might as well be soaping up the car with my chest,” she muttered knowing that as she was currently a walking dream for would-be rapists and their defense lawyers, she wouldn’t be hitching a ride back into town.

Turning her back on her traitorous Honda she aimed for home trying to remember which side of the street you were supposed to walk on to best avoid being mowed down by a driver. Not that there was much traffic on the road that night…. or ever in that place. Still she knew that once you’re luck has crested things can go from bad to worse in the blink of an eye. And no matter how terrible her night had been so far, dead was worse than wet and wheel-less.

She had to admit that having now been out long enough to be drenched to just this side of waterlogged, her mood was actually improving.

Having surrenderd to a soaking you realize it's not all that bad. It’s not often that your whole body gets to feel something. The real frustration with wet weather, she argued to herself, is the constant battle to stay dry. To defend all limbs and packages and pant legs simultaneously is futile and destined to make you feel a failure. Letting the fat droplets hit her square in the face, she felt invigorated, scrubbed clean. Baptized.

Baptized?

Why was it that whenever her thoughts turned to the sensual, religion was only a thoughtbeat behind?

Thoughtbeat!

She marveled at what a perfectly descriptive word thoughtbeat was and wondered how it could be that it wasn’t even a word at all. How could people explain this mental phenomenon without it? How had she?

Then she swore.

She swore because she had walked into the street sign at the corner of her block. Then she swore again because that kind of thing was always happening to her.

She swore one final time as she realized was already home. That meant she had spent the last three miles and forty minutes lost in her own head and had no recollection of the journey. That kind of thing was always happening too.

She checked herself over determined there was no damage and headed up the drive, the car and the reason she’d been driving it forgotten as she turned her thoughts to large soft towels and larger glasses of wine.

Sad news from the wire this morning about Sir Paul:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200605/s1641191.htm

But deep down I knew it couldn't last since he'll always be in love with me Linda.

I really had hoped things would work out. It would have been so much easier for us just to be together. One more thing to cross off life’s to do list. Find a partner? Check.

But he had to keep telling me jokes I’d heard before. A thousand times before.

And he couldn’t stop himself from grabbing the back of my neck when he drove even though he knew I HATED it when people touched my neck. “I’m not grabbing it, I’m rubbing it. …and I’m not people. I’m your man.”

Oh did I mention that he called himself “my man”? All the time he did this. In public.

Alone it was worse since he had the tendency to call himself “my big man”. Not only awful, but woefully overstated.

So that was uncalled for, I know.

But this is a guy who used to take his socks off in the living room at the end of the day then shove them in his pocket.

And the socks...

You know those black ones made out of some poly-rayon-plastic blend? They glistened in the light I swear to God. Shone like asphalt on a sweltering day. Sometimes I just wanted to scream “What did cotton ever do to you?“ But he would have laughed about it.

He laughed about everything. No fight in him. Even as I left he just sat there with a stupid smile on his face while I told him how miserable this life was making me. How miserable he was making me.

He said if I couldn’t be happy with him I’d better go be happy someplace else. And the whole time he’s going on and on wishing me the best all I can do is stare at the wet spot his beet bottle is making on the coffee table. My coffee table.

Couldn’t keep them in the fridge like everyone one else… had to stockpile his beer in the freezer. Nice and frosty and dripping like hell. Do you know how many times he forgot they were in there and they exploded? Do you know how many times our guests had to take their beer with a SPOON?

Anyway so he’s offering me the best graduation speech ever… follow your path, spread your wings. If you love someone set them free... and I’m pissy about the ruined coffee table.

So I’m the bitch right?

Yeah.

Well fine.

He can keep the coffee table.

At five years old he was an ugly child destined to become an ugly adult.

His mother has long been holding out hope that he would grow into the pink and chubby blue-eyed cherub she had always wanted. She had dismissed her first impression of the angry red wrinkly bundle he was at birth with the fairly accurate stereotype that all newborns are odd looking. She told people his pointed head would round as the gap closed and that his body would grown to balance out its somewhat shocking girth.

She told them when his hair finally grew in it would be thick and ringletted like his father’s. She told them children's eyes often change colour and that his dishwater grey ones would deepen to reflect the ocean blue of her own.

She had been telling people these things for quite some time.

But looking at him sitting in the back yard staring back at her through the kitchen window, she realized these miraculous changes would not come to pass and that she was looking at her son. Her funny-looking son.

He was thin and small and pale with the gait of an old arthritic. This was presumably due to the weight of his enormous egg-shaped head, mostly an expanse of forehead making his features seem cramped and undersized. His hair had never fully come in, leaving him with a sparse monk’s tonsure of dirty-blond hair which his mother had been tempted to chalk up to treatments for an illness in the face of strangers’ glances(on more than one occasion).

The realization that she didn’t love her son poured over her like ice water. The sensation was unpleasant, but only mildly so. She would get used to it. She didn’t blame herself for this lack of motherly affection, she blamed him.

It wasn’t just his looks that left her cold she told herself, though she could admit it was a major part of it. It was his attitude about it.

He wasn’t a pleaser this ugly boy. He didn’t try to do things to make her forget, to make it up to her. He didn’t fade into the carpet when people came over. He didn’t stay quite and self-conscious. He wasn’t funny and self-deprecating. He wasn’t ashamed of how he'd turned out. He wasn’t sorry.

And she felt, in the deep dark place that you pretend you don’t have, that he ought to be. And she knew that was why she hated him.

Guess I’m not the only one who thinks the mojito needs a little firing up.

Reinventing the Mojito

(Thank You Timothy McSweeney!)