Early morning and its still dark outside. Mother coming into my room quietly, strokes my cheek and whispers I have to get up and come into the kitchen. Warm toes and eyes that refuse to open, rubbing my eyes, feel like I am only rubbing in pure sleep, glueing them shut. Resisting, lifting the covers and stepping onto the floor, baby brother lying fast asleep in his bunkbed and dreaming of big lorries and tanks.
A half-lit hallway, livingroom shrouded in darkness, orange snake of light sneaking around the doorway to the kitchen. My hair sticking up at the back, fringe behaving independently, pillow hairstyle as usual. The advent star in the kitchen window casting millions of tiny little golden starshapes all over the walls and the tabletops, silhouetted up against the dark outlines of the mountain in the background, dark blue winter darkness. Candlelight, hot chocolate and fancy things in fancy paper on the kitchen table.
The beginning of advent, in the time before the international AIDS day, before the days of red ribbons on lapels, when the blue-white-and-red flag was flying in the frosty wind to celebrate a constitutional independence for a small country in the North Atlantic. Picture of Santa on the back of a newspaper says 24 days until Christmas and soon the house will be filled with the smell of silverpolish. Even the travelling dance school took the day off.
Crawling out of bed early in the morning, the same day but a good few years later. Trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes and feeding the furballs half blind in the early hours. A pile of almost completed arrangements on the kitchen table and the red glow from the light on the coffee maker creeps over the tabletop. Outside the same winter colours of a morning and the mountain just as dark against the morning sky.
Crossing out a date on the calendar, thinking that it doesnt feel that long ago when I had red pyjamas with a blue collar and thought that I would grow a lot overnight.
