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Bedtime Confessions VIII

It's Zaftig time when the cheap bottle of white wine emerges, lavender candles are lit, and the Portishead CD makes it into the stereo. The phone is unhooked; the cellular tucked away; the lights are off; and it's just me, wine, music, my laptop, and my thoughts. Tonight is one of those nights -- where the weight of my life presses heavily onto my mind. Sister just called and cried for an hour. She wants to stay with me for a few days. I don't want her to. I DON'T want her to come here. It's a cutting honesty, but it's honesty. She wants to saturate me with blackness, and I like pink and blue. My life is shades of baby pink and blue, with flecks of gold thrown in for glamour. I won't have these colors in my life with her enveloping and suffocating black strangling everything. It will crawl my walls and settle above my head, eating at me, sucking me in. Inward I will go to become a shell, a zombie. She wants me to become her. I can't. I WON'T. Life is good. Life is worth. "All Minnnnnnne!" Beth Gibbons sings with embedded pain masquerading as soul. It's how I feel. This life is All Minnnnnne! My life is colors and lights.

"No, Zaftig. Tell her 'no,'" says my mother. I agree. It's not mean, it's what's best. "Let her fight her demons."

I rationalize: "If...something....If she does somet--"

"No."

So I called her back and told her, "No."

"I'll see you this weekend," she replies.

"All Minnnnnne!"

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