#writeblr romance

rewriting this wip which I hardly shared when I started it more than a year ago, but here’s a bit of the new first chapter. no idea where it’s going.

Some things simply shouldn’t change.

I know I’m stubborn, and I know that I have a difficult time with things ending. My ideal world looks something like the frosted snowglobe sitting on the fireplace mantel, the little house nestled within it exactly as it was when my parents bought it at an estate sale two decades ago: a hand painted Edwardian box, windows aglow like they were truly lit and not just gilded, snow capped trees a twisted wilderness surrounding. Perfect and stable even when shaken, when the weather turns. A utopia frozen in time.

On principle, I’m not against change. I think lots of things should change—the traffic light on 6th Street that’s totally rigged for tickets, the confidence men hold in their ameteur photography of their genitalia, our current economic system.

But I’m a woman who lives by tradition and structure and ritual. I drink a cinnamon latte every morning, and I like to read the paper on the fire escape as I do so. I know the regular commuters on my subway. I haven’t eaten a bagel that’s not from the place down my street in five years. I go home for the holidays.

Like, it’s only right to spend a whole weekend perusing the shops in the city for gifts, to eat freshly baked cornetti on Christmas morning in the packed kitchen, spilling coffee as tiny cousins, nieces, and nephews whine to rip their presents open. Before New Year’s, we get high in the attic, we take the kids to the Carnival, we nearly burn down the house trying to make a ham. It’s not eggnog at all if it’s not spiked with too much brandy, and it’s not Christmas if it’s not celebrated here, in this house, in Culcheth.

Apparently my parents—my whole family, even—disagree. They say, buck tradition! It’s time for a change, to let go, to start a new chapter. To stick a for sale sign in the front yard like a death omen, a spray-tanned, white-toothed real estate agent named Vicki as the Grim Reaper.