December 21, 2002
Unravel
I am suffering from a mysterious disease, though I think I am now on the road to recovery. Am feeling more lethargic than usual, which, I can assure you, is saying something.
What I was going to write about slips my mind, but the pressure of the need to write remains. The house is quiet. The lights on the tree are casting fractal patterns on the ceiling and walls, and his voice is still close to my ear despite the phone having returned to its cradle.
Where did December go? Christmas already, in less than a week, and though my presents are wrapped my cards are not yet sent (and likely never to be, so many feeble apologies), though the snow has been thick it has too soon melted. I feel like Charlie Brown.
There are photographs on the computer desk of my brother and I when we were children, feathered hair and acid washed jeans abounding on my end. Christmas was like magic when I was a kid. Justin, my brother, and I would sit up the whole night in the dark of our shared room, and, when we got older, one or the other would creep into the room of one or the other and the tradition would continue. I remember one Christmas we sang the first verse of 'Silent Night' at least thirty times before my mother heard us and came storming in to scold us into sleep.
We didn't, of course.
Every year, without fail, I would leave a Christmas card for Santa, hand fashioned, of course, alongside the cookies and milk and carrot sticks. Inside there was a place for him to leave his signature, my excuse being that I needed it for hard evidence and personal sentimentality. Every year, without fail, either my mother or my father would expertly forge St. Nick's signature. I checked his handwriting against their own, just to be sure.
Sometime around four in the morning Justin would steal into the living room and marvel at the packages that were piled underneath of the tree. He knew better than to touch them, and better (after a few unfortunate incidences earlier in our youth) than to wake my parents at this hour. He would, instead, just sit and stare at them, and often beg my company in doing so.
I preferred, however, to take but a quick peek and jump back into bed, not to sleep, but to dream.
Sure, I loved getting new toys. I wasn't an entirely abnormal child, and, on Christmas, I wanted a Malibu Barbie same as any other eight year old girl. Christmas also, however, was proof. Proof that it wasn't all stop and go, real and make-believe, what you could see that was and what you couldn't that wasn't. Santa Claus was real, and so were his elves, and they lived in the North Pole and he magicked himself all over the world in one night. And if he was real, and I had proof of it, here in my very own house, year after year, then everything else could be real, too, right? I just hadn't found a way yet of making that so. One day I'd catch a fairy in a jar, just like a lightning bug, and that'd be one more lovely drop of contentment in my soul.
I don't remember exactly when Christmas stopped being just this way. One year I simply slept through the night, and was more than surprised to wake up to the sun. I knew by then, of course, that Santa Claus wasn't real, but for awhile that didn't matter. There was still something electric in the air on Christmas Eve.
I get that feeling at strange times now. On really crisp Autumn days, mostly.
I think my rampant reading of Neil Gaiman's American Gods and listening to Bjork have put me in a strange mood indeed.
I want to feel better so I can kiss Mike and not feel guilty about it.
I want it to snow for Christmas so I can write something profound in it and take a picture.
astera at 10:36 p.m.