On the 11th day of Christmas, or the 3rd day of January depending on your religious persuasion, I sit alone in my kitchen staring at the reflection of the lights on the sliding glass doors of the Christmas tree that I haven’t set on fire yet.
If eleven Pipers are piping I don’t hear them yet. If I do I will call the Tybee Island Police Department who will tase them as the Tybee Island Police Department is prone to do and then there would likely be flutes, burnt grass and stuff cluttering the yard.
If 12 Drummers drumming show up tomorrow I now have a rocket launcher and will take them all out at once.
“Your writing has been so sad,” I was written.
Duh!
You live through your first Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s by yourself and let me know if you don’t get sad.
I have friends who have lost their husbands or wives over the past few years and the holidays will never be the same to them again …at least not in the same way.
Perhaps they will find new love or someone to fill the void and once again the Kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven.
Or perhaps it won’t.
Tonight it won’t.
It’s funny when you are married or in a deep relationship and you live together how much you enjoy having the house to yourself. You watch whatever you want on television, use all of the hot water in the bath, quietly sit and read or pee off of the porch if you want. You relish these times because your husband, wife, significant other or kids take it all which is most of the time.
So when you get the time alone in your own place …well…what a luxurious gift.
Then the one you love dies, leaves, can’t be there or the kids grow up and leave or some combination of all of the above. Or because the one you love has to be somewhere else.
And you get it all to yourself. The whole place is yours and you can keep the television channel on whatever you want all of the time. Or not at all!
Cook or go out becomes life’s most interesting question.
But when no one is coming, and you know that no one is coming, you either embrace that or you don’t. You curse who left or died or can’t be there or you love them in a whole different way; a way that doesn’t need words or touch or “the suddenly compact universe of skin and teeth and hair.”
And the house is filled with memories or loneliness or both.
So there is one more day of Christmas according to the old carol. Most people have already stored it away until next year anyway. And God damn those twelve drummers drumming if they show up.
Unless…
That is what love sounds like.
