A Long December

It's been a poor week. If it's true that bad things come in threes, I must have been dressed to the nines in unfortunate karma.

My wallet was pickpocketed and then, as I was standing in my bedroom, trying to think where it might have gone, my pearl necklace broke and sent pearls, rolling like warm bullets, down my neck and shirt. The sound of them clattering on the floor was like thunder and I crawled like a blind woman, deperately feeling for the tiny pink orbs with my hands.

Today wasn't any better. People were rude and threatening in the few jobs that I had to do, a big piece of work I'd put a lot of time and thought into didn't completely pan out and my new $100 sandals started cracking. That's the last time I pay that price for shoes, Jimmy Choo be damned.

I've had worse days before, for example when I made a phenomenally huge mistake in the paper and that very day, I kid you not, a dog PEED on my bag. I laugh my way through all those moments, but I'm just a girl and sometimes, there's nothing for it but to put your head down and have a good cry.

The day I lost the pearls, I remembered what Janet Fitch said in White Oleander about expensive pearl necklaces that had a knot between each ball of lucre so that if the strand broke, only one would be lost. She wished her life were like that, she wrote, all knotted so it wouldn't scatter each time something bad happened.

That night, when it seemed like everything had snowballed out of all control, I sat on my bed, put my head on my knees and wept.

The tears dispersed in the darkness, like pearls, and I knew just what she meant.