adv creative nonfiction
“How happy is the blameless Vestal’s lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray’r accepted, each wish resign’d.”
- Alexander Pope
I don’t want to tell you this but it is December tenth and I am crying in front of my laptop.
“I guess you were right, Linus - I shouldn’t have picked this little tree.”
I’m not just crying. I’m weeping.
“Everything I do turns into a disaster,” Charlie mopes, “I guess I just don’t know what Christmas is all about.”
I’m wiping the sogginess off of my right cheek…
This is embarrassing.
*
I hadn’t meant for this to happen. I didn’t download A Charlie Brown Christmas and expect a sob flick. I had rediscovered the classic TV special of my childhood during my search for Christmas spirit on iTunes and watched it on this Thursday night because that Sociology essay just wasn’t happening and it was raining so that bar wasn’t either. And because I was lonely.
It was all part of a grander scheme. My preceding Christmas had been riddled with mono, a real holiday/any-day downer. I promised myself that this Christmas I would take advantage of all things festive to make up for what was lost to the Epstein-Barr virus during the last holiday season and it started off solidly - cut-out snowflakes (mine still looking awkward like they did in first grade), Mariah Carey’s Christmas album on repeat, a Secret Santa gift exchange complete with one friend getting a vibrator (Merry Christmas, Sarah). And then there was the unassuming Charlie Brown Christmas, a twenty minute distraction and seemingly nothing more. I watched the bigheaded, two-dimensional characters hobble around on my laptop screen, throwing snowballs at each other, discussing a mundane Christmas play, Pig Pen with his tumbleweed of a dirt cloud gyrating around him and Lucy with her unrealistic winter wear and a lisp. I’d known them my whole life. The calm piano is playing the background, Charlie Brown is completely self-deprecating.
And then it happened.
“Christmas time is here/Happiness and cheer/Fun for all that children call/Their favorite time of year…”
I tried to stop it but I couldn’t. First my eyes burned and I tried ignoring it. I always tried to ignore it.
I’m not a crier. I refuse to be a crier.
Charlie and his friends grab hands and ice skate together to the song. “Snowflakes in the air/Carols everywhere/Olden times and ancient rhymes/Of love and dreams to share…”
Warm globs of water began to speed down my cheeks until they reached my jaw line to catch their breath. They gathered at one spot of wetness and joined forces to dribble off me and spread dark little circles on my pillowcase.
Fuck.
I cried for most of the show. The nostalgia had become too much for me to bear as the sensations of what it was like to be young flooded back to me with a single sixties TV special. At nineteen I was certainly young by most standards - however, the youthful feeling invoked by that “blockhead” Charlie Brown was the warmth of innocence, a purity I no longer had at nineteen, a purity that I didn’t think I would ever entirely regain.
I closed my laptop and checked my phone when the show was over; J still hadn’t texted me. Maybe he wasn’t going to. I hummed the melody of the Charlie Brown Christmas song to myself as I fell asleep that night, my phone by my head.
*
As it turns out, my addict-like cravings for Christmas spirit were rooted in more than a mere disappointment in my antecedent holiday season. During this December a part of my world was crumbling -- mono I could handle, this was tougher to bear.
It wasn’t always like this. J and I, we loved each other, we did, but that hadn’t been enough. Eventually, love couldn’t make up for two thousand five hundred miles. Love couldn’t stop my raging control issues, his callous words, our mutual frustration. Love couldn’t make up for the hours of sleep lost. Love couldn’t make up for my youth that’d been lost.
And so it was during this Christmas more than any other that I wanted to feel innocent again. I cried not for Charlie Brown and his poor tree selection, or his inordinate amounts of animated social isolation; instead I cried because of how beautiful it felt to hear the songs of my childhood Christmases floating in my mind, softly pulling out happy, dusty memories from the crevices of my thoughts. I cried because that childhood would never come back, because the Charlie Brown Christmas special was just a temporary whisper of a time already passed. I wished now more than ever that the Christmas tree waiting for me in a Los Angeles suburb would tower over me in mystical magnificence, its lights glowing like a pagan god. I’d stare up at it in complete awe. I wished now more than ever for Santa to be real. I wanted to believe because the one thing I truly believed in for over a year was now slipping away. I cried for those times when Shane would wake me up in footy-pajamas with a flashlight in my face and whisper “Santa came!” I cried for a time when my heart was still unbroken.
Christmas is one of those things that will be inevitably demystified for everyone. I found out Santa wasn’t real in fourth grade and felt seriously betrayed by my mom. It was sunny and we were in our backyard when she destroyed my sense of trust in others.
“Santa is like Christmas spirit, and that is something that you will always have in your heart. I was your Santa, but he will always exist if you let him, even when you become the Santa for someone else.”
In other words, AJ, everything you found joy in during December was a total lie.
Looking for something to hold onto, I responded to my mother with “What about the Easter Bunny?!” She nodded her head gravely and I sat in silence. What could I do? What did I have to believe in now? First Santa, now the mythical Easter Bunny? A decade or so later, as I was returning to Los Angeles and my dying relationship for the holidays, I realized that Christmas still wasn’t the same despite my efforts to tease out the magic that had encompassed it during my youth, pre-my-mother’s-bombshell -- cut-out snowflakes can only do so much. In the end, it was just another December twenty-fifth.
*
January came and brought a new year along with a Los Angelean heat wave. J and I had gathered up enough hope to give winter break a chance, but there had been backpedaling, the fights where I am heaving and he is telling me to get out, the times when we are yelling and turning our cell phones off. There had been the moments where he tells me he doesn’t know why we are still doing this. I didn’t know either sometimes.
I sat at my computer one of those January nights alone in my room, journaling, until out of boredom and curiosity I opened up my epic journal from 2007. Two hundred and fifty-six pages of my life in single-spaced, twelve-point font -- and I hadn’t even written during the last two months of that year. It was impressive in size and scope, to say the least.
I scanned through old entries while the computer screen glowed blue on my face and read about my mistakes, my many mistakes. Entry after entry about the same boys, the same eating issues. How grand in magnitude they had seemed in the moment, how far from me they seemed on this night in January. Pages and pages of me not understanding why guys weren’t asking me out - “Am I not skinny enough?” I’d ask, “Why won’t he text me?” I’d wonder. Pages of me calorie-counting and finding validation through a size drop in pants. Stories about my first time being truly shit-faced-drunk, the detailings of my prom and the spray-on tan that accompanied it. Entries filled with moments of humiliation and adolescent angst, of boys and then men owing me no respect and me typing through out it all, shell shocked while at my keyboard. Sentences trying to ignore the imminent flaws in every guy I met. Pages of me accepting being groped and then not called.
I scrolled down past story after story to around page two hundred and met J again. I read and was back at that party, that party in August at his place where he didn’t kiss me but he told me he thought I was beautiful. I was again at Yankee Doodle eating a bad quesadilla across from him, and then on a lawn chair in his backyard during a meteor shower, laughing till I couldn’t breathe. I was once more trying to keep myself from shaking as he smelled the perfume on the left side of my neck. I was under that streetlight where he finally did kiss me, his hand on my face and nowhere else. I was on his gray carpeting in his glowing, red room making out with him, not thinking, just feeling.
Being told Santa isn’t real is one thing, but realizing that the magic of your relationship has been demystified is another. These moments seemed to be haunting me through my computer screen, reminding me of a time long gone. When had I gone from being called the girl he wanted to one day marry to being called a bitch?
In January I was once again in front of my computer, crying and a little embarrassed. We had fought the day before but I texted him anyway on this night while the tears drowned my eyes, telling him that he was the person that had changed everything, he was the only one that was different, he had been perfect, he loved me for me. I wanted desperately to go back to those days, when we hadn’t called each other names or made each other cry. I wanted us to be innocent again. Perhaps, like Christmas, we simply knew too much for it to ever be the same. Santa isn’t real and you told me to go fuck myself because I’d started another fight. Yeah, I think we all just knew too much, and I didn’t know how to make the knowledge go away. I didn’t know how to make us happy again. At an age where getting older is welcomed because we college students hate using fake IDs, I must confess that I just wanted to grow young.
*
And of course, that was more impossible than I could have imagined. Not only could I not undo years of hormonal change, but neither I nor anyone else could subtract experience and knowledge from my composite being. I will always remember that fight in his front yard and that moment when Christmas was adulterated with truths. I will always be nostalgic when I think of waking up to my hot pink Power Wheel parked casually in front of my old living room couch. Or when I think of that rose he gave me when he saw me for the first time in five and a half weeks. He tasted like mouthwash and asked me if I were real, he wanted to believe that I was there. I was. I still am.
During my lonely Charlie Brown Christmas viewing party, I had reached an impasse in life’s knowledge. I knew certain things were wrong (that fight about L, it was my fault, and I’m sorry) -- I could still feel them reverberate painfully within -- yet I did not have the know-how to apply the knowledge I’d gained and make things better. Instead, life continually walloped me with lessons until my skin tightened and burned from the slaps. With time I finally began to understand what it takes to make a relationship adapt to life’s curves. Yet, still learning, I am not entirely there.
A few nights after rereading my old journal entries I printed them up for J and let him read them while we lied in bed on what would be one of my last nights in LA for several weeks. He told me he liked reminiscing and asked if he could keep the copies; I said yes, but when I left for New York a few days later I stuffed the papers into my bag without telling him and went to Burbank airport. I held him in my arms in front of the Jet Blue terminal and began to understand that when you know the one that you love returns the feeling with just as much depth, you have the kind of magic that can overcome the things you’d rather forget. It is the same feeling that makes me look forward to being someone’s Santa each Christmas - the transition from the magic of Santa to the magic of generosity. And Santa didn’t come to my house this year, he hasn’t for quite awhile, but I gave J an iPhone and smiled just like I did many Christmases ago when I swung my chunky legs into my Barbie Power Wheel and felt like the world was at my fingertips.
Planes were taking off overhead, coloring the air with noise. He pulled my backpack off me to ease the weight from my shoulders and placed it on the sidewalk next to my rolling suitcase. An airport employee was yelling something at us from far away, probably about parking. The sky was silver. J kissed me for one last time and I realized it wasn’t that we knew too much, it was that we needed to know more. It would come with time. But for now, knowing that he loved me would have to suffice.