A Ghost At the Back of Your Closet

Christmas is back in its rightful place.

There's snow on the ground in Richmond, Rashka is sleeping next to me, and I am not too many thousands of miles away delivering the kin of strangers.

It is everything I would have given for last year as I sat and cried into my evangelical Christmas dinner.

And yet, something is missing.

I feel it deep down, almost as if my soul is patting its pockets to make sure it didn't leave anything at home. Perhaps its the lack of awkward phone calls from my father. Perhaps its the conscious decision to delete Lovely coming back to bite me.

If my dreams recently have been telling enough, perhaps it both.

Lovely crept into my sleep last night, showed up as my memory of him. I spent most of the day settled in my mind, until I realized that I had simply dreamed it. Even when I delete that old neighbor from everything I can touch, he is still tangled up somewhere in the frontal lobe.

Whatever the reason, the presents are wrapped, the tree is up, and I have six hours to figure out how to feel that genuine sigh I used to get when I was little and I would wake up and it was exactly the right day.

I can't miss two Christmas mornings in a row.

Perhaps waking up in a foreign bed amongst strangers was the wall between childhood and everything else.

At least I still have Rashka and the snow.

You Or Your Memory

My subconscious and I are currently at odds, and it has won this round as I am afraid to fall back to dreams for fear existence will cease.

I had just come home, but instead of following normal streets, I drove to my grandparents.

I walked in alone and stood in the dining room, wondering why no one was here for the meal set out.

And I heard the car drive up, and walked to the window, and peered out of curtains older than two generations.

And there was my father.

Here's where my subconscious slighty shifts reality, as I calmly walked out and hugged him.

I felt myself remembering how long it has already been. And then I asked. "Why aren't you dead?"

He turns to me and says "I have been quietly driving around drunk for a very long time."

And suddenly others pull up and set out food outside. And suddenly its night. And suddenly my father is sitting on the grass as if it were just another dream.

I walked up to him, towered over his shell, informed him that he had faked his death.

He informed me that he had faked his death. He reached for me, to hug me again. But I felt my body and my anger walking away.

The thought that I could see him again after all of that mourning made me hate him. I had done my grieving, I deserved to never see him again. I opened the car door, let out sparks and yellow jackets. I started to drive, and woke up in my bed in Massachusetts, almost relieved that he was dead.

I have not dreamed about my father since he stopped leaving quiet voicemails for me on otherwise loud nights.

It scares me that my subconscious has been holding him from me. It worries me that I walked away and did not hug him goodbye for the final time. It kills me that I will always feel tricked by some existential slight at hand, never to know all of the truth.

To think I had assumed that tonight would only bring works cited, physiology reading, and just a pinch of loneliness.

I guess those are the nights you really have to worry about.

I forget December's uncanny ability to bring out the ghosts.

Send It Out To Sea

I will never understand it, but I think it has something to do with Virginia and the grass filled cost that comes with investing in a snowman.

Once a year, I wake up to the usual last part of the exhale that is December.

and the snow has come for me.

All of these moments are connected. This year I am pulled back to dirt under my fingernails from holding on to what I knew.

Time on that day kept stepping on my toes, whispering in my ear to remember all of it, because it would never be the same again.

At the end of this year, I am going to throw away my map of roads that lead nowhere.

Roads to New Hampshire. Roads to that reincarnation of my father's attention staring across the room. Roads that sigh in the morning to make up for the lack of dual breath.

Here is where today brings me peace.

Here is where I have come full circle, and my phone is off, and my room is filled with the sound of snow and nothing else.

And here is where I am happy with this.

I worry sometimes that I have forgotten some of the moments in my life that brought me this feeling.

But then the sound of white comes along, and it's all still there.

No matter if the roads no longer are.