i’m back home. funny, isn’t it, back home. it’s ironic, because i don’t know where home is. i thought it was here; i still am fairly sure that it’s here. but i was trimming the tree today, and i smelled this sort of musty-but-clean smell. it’s my favorite smell in the world, and it smells like clothes and people kept in a lonely, heartbreaking house somewhere in france in the middle of a tearful, long winter. the smell of steel comfort (so i call it) also dwells on the christmas lights we borrowed from my neighbor, to trim the tree. which is why, as i wound strings of lights in spirals and spirals and spirals up and down the tree that made me feel small, i fell into a familiar melancholy.
it is a familiar melancholy because it is the same melancholy that overtakes me every christmas, as i trim the tree and decorate the house alone. it is colored by memories reflected in a glass bulb hanging from a christmas tree that was incinerated a long time ago. it echoes in my head like the songs i used to try to play on a tuneless piano. and then on a xylophone. and they were songs that i thought i could sing. but my parents could actually sing them. and they had beautiful voices, especially together. trimming the tree was once a family affair. i remember when dad would set up the tree base, and we’d string lights and hang bulbs. break bulbs. we still have those ancient bulbs. the old glass ones – before the matte silver ikea glass ones – and the thread-coated ones. those have been around forever. and the ornate bulbs – styrofoam i’m sure, but beautifully painted and ornamented with beads and string – that i for some reason associate with neenie… those have been around since i was very, very young. i remember we used to balance them on top of the old futon, next to the white birds that we still have and still use. there were electric candelabras in the windows. my baby brother looked on with big, earnest brown eyes that held the secrets of the universe, according to a child. so the whole family would make the house cheerful for christmas.
now it’s just me.
my mom and my brother actually waited for me to come home to decorate the house. they say i have artistic talent; they say that i have gifted hands. whatever i touch becomes beautiful (with the obvious exception of myself). and, you know, maybe they’re right. they helped a little this year, but i ended up spending an hour of my evening shuffling around various shiny things to make the house prettier. and i was alone again, with my collection of quiet, thought-inducing christmas music that sounded vaguely as if it might have been sung by my father. i was alone with my materialistic, distorted holiday in my materialistic, distorted mind. usually, when i make things, i get an endorphin rush and am on a high for a day or so. but when i make the house into a work of art for christmas, all i feel is the familiar melancholy. it’s a feeling of being alone that i very simply can’t shake. i can even be surrounded by people but i feel like i am completely isolated with this holiday, this holy day that has been sacrificed on the altar of consumerism, and it threatens to break me down.
a year ago, i wasn’t so all alone at christmas. it was the first time in a long time that i hadn’t cried myself to sleep every night for several weeks straight, dreading the holiday. but last christmas is another ghost of something that felt unnaturally happy and unnaturally right. someone was there. i had someone to hope by my side. and i thought i was stronger, i thought i was finally learning to come above my circumstances. but when i look at it now, i think i was just happy and deceiving myself. hindsight without foresight is ever so agonizing.
in any case, i was wrong.
i was wrong and today i am as alone as i ever was. but i am hurt. and as long as i don’t turn that hurt inwards, it makes me stronger.
the ghosts of christmas past haunt me still, through starry sky and bitter winter chill.
