Karrin Murphy is tiny but fierce (karrinmurphysi) wrote in madisonvalley, @ 2013-12-03 06:04:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log, !open, ~2013 december, ~40 points, ~~casey shraeger (havesecrets), ~~karrin murphy (karrinmurphysi) |
WHO: Karrin Murphy and OPEN
WHAT: Thinking about Christmas
WHEN: Tuesday morning
WHERE: Cafe Camille
WARNINGS: TBD
STATUS: OPEN/Ongoing
Freaking fairies.
The more this went on, the more she hated it. At first, she'd barely noticed, but now, as time passed, she was beginning to feel, well...empty. Not sick. Not in pain. Just...well, yeah, empty. Like nothing really mattered. And as Christmas approached, she was starting to feel it more and more acutely.
To be honest, she'd never liked Christmas, or at least not for a long time. Yeah, Chicago was always beautiful this time of year - freezing cold and miserable, but beautiful - but it had always been a time to get together with family, which had never been Murphy's favorite thing to do. She always felt like she'd failed her mother, failed her family. Failed herself. Her two crumbled marriages always came back to smack her in the face this time of year, along with a whole shelf of what-could-have-should-have-beens. It came down to the fact that she was going on forty, alone, and without any family to speak of, and nothing but her career to hold up as an accomplishment. And that hadn't gone so well either.
But this year...well, none of that really seemed to matter. She didn't feel the pain, the sadness, the regret. She didn't miss her exes, or spend hours pouring over old photo albums. She just...didn't care. And that just might have been worse.
Sitting in the gaudily decorated breakfast cafe (the food was good and inexpensive, anyway), at a table by herself, she wished she could feel it. It felt as if everything she cared about was had been stripped away - and hadn't it? Wasn't that what love was? It wasn't just your romantic entanglements, but the sum total of all those things you cared about. The things that made you who you were.
She should call Harry. But he couldn't fix it, could he? Could anyone? Or was she doomed to be this way for the rest of eternity? And anyway, he was busy and she didn't want to bother him. And of course, this made things weird where he was concerned, as well.
She took a bite of her eggs and put down her fork, not as hungry as she'd originally imagined herself to be. She got up, put money for a tip on the table, and made her way to the cash register to pay, getting in line behind a few people, the front most of whom was giving the cashier a hard time over having to pay for bacon he claimed "wasn't crispy enough."
Murphy rolled her eyes.
"Christmas spirit, huh?" she muttered.