Like mother, like daughter

     "Hey, Ashley and some of the other neighborhood kids are playing in her yard across the street.  Want to go see if you can join them?" I asked, sitting down on the floor of her room.  I had to be careful where I sat - the only light came in around the blinds on the windows, and there were ornaments everywhere.  Apparently, I was raising a mole or a bat or something.
     "Nah," she said, looking at the floor.
     "Come on, this is the last nice day we're supposed to get for a week or more.  Get your boots and go say hello."
     "Dad said I had to pack up my Christmas tree."
     "The Christmas tree can wait.  It's 35 degrees and sunny, and there are kids playing outside.  Go take advantage of the opportunity."
     "I said hello to Ashley one day when I was walking home from the bus, and I know she heard me, and she didn't say anything back.  I don't think she wants to be my friend."  She continued the World's Slowest Christmas Tree Un-Decorating, taking one ornament at a time off of the tree, slowly trudging across the room and putting it on her bed.
     "You know, there have been plenty of times in your life when I've said something to you at a perfectly normal volume, and you haven't responded.  Sometimes you didn't hear me, sometimes you were distracted by something else, sometimes you didn't feel like talking.  Chances are, Ashley wasn't trying to shun you, that's just in your mind."  In my mind, I am wincing - how many times had I given up on a friendship with someone over some perceived slight or lack of attention?  How often had that been in my head, rather than an intentional move by the other person?
     "I don't want to go over there.  I feel like I would be butting in."  My heart breaks a little at that statement, which came out of my own mouth about a million times as I was growing up.
     "You don't have to join them.  You could just go say hi, then come back to our yard.  Or you could see if  Ashley wanted to come see your snow cave.  I bet you could both fit in there, don't you think?"
     "We probably could," she said, sounding a little more enthusiastic.  "But I couldn't fit all of them in there at once.  They'd have to take turns."  Then she stopped smiling and slowly moved another ornament over to the bed.  "See, you always do this.  I don't want to do something, and then you start talking about it, and then I start adding on things like I want to do it or something.  I don't want to talk about it."
     "Too bad.  Look, everyone feels unsure when they're meeting new people.  I bet you'd really like to go and play with them, but you're afraid that they won't want to play with you, and that's keeping you from going over.  Haven't you been complaining for the past week that your only friend who lives nearby was out of town?  You're not going to make new friends by hiding in the house, Chief."
     "I don't want new friends.  I want my old friends to be closer.  Can we call K.'s mom again, see if she changed her mind about letting K. come over?"
     "Look, I'm glad you're still friends with K., but that doesn't change the fact that it would be nice to have friends who live closer than a half-hour drive away.  It's important that you meet people in the neighborhood.  and you are running out of time, for today at least.  You want to know my prediction?  You're going to hem and haw and fart around, and then you'll finally decide to go say hello - and they won't be outside anymore."
     "Is this your ornament, or the one I made?" she asked, holding up two clay candy canes.  "See what I'm doing?  I don't want to talk about going outside, so I'm changing the subject."
     "Yeah, that was subtle.  I'm going downstairs," I said, then went over to the window to open the blinds.  The sun streamed in, glittering off of the ornaments that remained on her tree.  "And, oh, look!" I said with feigned surprise, "the kids have all gone inside now.  You're safe once again from making a new friend.  Congratulations."  My stomach roiled and I scowled as I stomped down the stairs, not sure if I was more angry with her for today's Failure to Befriend, or myself for all of my own identical missed opportunities.

Tiny Scrap of Fiction: "End as you mean to go on"

     "'End as you mean to go on.'  What a load of superstitious bullshit," she thought, throwing another load of laundry into the washer.  As if the Fates cared whether her house was clean, her fridge was full of food, or her wallet was bulging at the seams.  Her family had been following the New Year's tradition for as long as she could remember, and it hadn't done them a bit of good, as far as she could tell.  And yet here she was, scrubbing and mending and filing as if her life depended on it.  Ridiculous.

     Truth be told, she wasn't sure she wanted her life to go on at all, regardless of whether it was full of luck and prosperity.  Things had just gotten to be too much - too much work, too much hassle, too much heartbreak.  One setback she could handle, or maybe even two.  But losing her job, and her marriage, and her father all in one year?  There wasn't much left to look forward to in the new year.

     All around her, she could practically hear her neighbors hastily scribbling their resolutions.  Lose weight.  Work less.  Take up a hobby.  Cook more and eat out less.  Nicely defined goals for the new year, with results that could be measured and graphed and analyzed, if they wanted.  Of course, most of her neighbors would have abandoned their goals by February and gone back to business as usual, but that was beside the point.

     What was she supposed to resolve, when so many of her heartbreaks were so big and completely outside of her control?  "I resolve that this year will suck less than last year" wasn't even necessarily attainable, given the way things had been going recently.  She had gone to her oncologist a few weeks ago for a routine check-up, and the look on his face when he reviewed her scans made her heart stop.  Nothing was certain, and it wouldn't be until she had the in-depth tests done in a few weeks, but she knew what they'd show.  It was back - maybe in its old stomping ground, maybe in a satellite colony somewhere new and exciting, but the cancer was back.  That was a great way to start of the new year, with a diagnosis of recurrence after all those months of being cancer-free.

     "Fuck this," she said out loud, throwing the toilet scrubber down in disgust.  End as you mean to go on, indeed.  She poured herself a drink, turned on the television, and called up her favorite episode of Dirty Jobs.  If Death was going to make a play for her this year, she wasn't going to waste her time cleaning.  It could just pick its way around the piles of mail and laundry if it wanted to get to her.  She had more important things to do.