Dear Former Future Husband,
I had never had a Christmas like that before. Your family, even with their slightly bourgeois dysfunction, was essentially good and loving. Your aunts and uncles were sweet, if not a little distant. They’d never met me, The It’s Getting Pretty Serious Girlfriend.
Even spending ten hours packed into a car with your parents had its moments: your mother’s uninhibited love for Sly and The Family Stone and your father’s retreat into his classical compositions. How you’d yell G-FORCES whenever we’d take a sharp turn and I would lean hard against you, the scruff of your winter-beard tickling my pale cheeks as I prayed I would sleep through the inevitable carsickness.
Christmas morning I woke early to find coffee in a house I’d never been in (a skill that went as far back as my days as being, essentially, a foster kid). Your uncle was awake and we watched the snow fall as he stoked the fire. We didn’t have to talk, it was just a calm, warm and pleasant beginning to a day that didn’t need to hurry, that wasn’t dripping with resentment and the chaos of the unmedicated.
He did, perhaps, quietly nurse his regrets as we opened presents. I think your parents did; but we were just kids, then. Your mother bought me Ugg boots and your aunt gave me a sweater that was the first piece of non-used clothing I’d owned in five years. You gave me turtle earrings and a kiss.
The next Christmas was much the same, and I was comfortable. I loved your family, they loved me, and it was easy. We all cozied up on the couch and watched Christmas movies (classics that I’d never seen) and your mother let me rest my head in her lap when I started to feel sick from the change in routine, my stomach whirling despite how I grinned.
The next year, the last, you were not there but I was. You called us on the phone from rehab and screamed at all of us in turn. I slept a sedative induced sleep through Christmas Day. The next morning your mother came and woke me, fearing I was dead. I had been deeply asleep for eighteen hours and hadn’t opened a single gift.
I knew, even then, as I sat in front of the wood stove drying my hair (like your mother taught me) that I would never have another Christmas there.
I worried that the last Christmas would taint, or undo, the magic of the previous two. But as time has gone on, I realize that it didn’t. It only strengthened my bond to the good memories. In the same way that all of the horrible, rotten Christmases of my childhood didn’t hold a candle to the two life-changing ones I had when you loved me, the one Christmas you didn’t will never ruin the gift you gave me.
A thrill of hope.
