Last week in a bit of a sleepless frenzy I bought a string of ridiculous pastel fairy lights, old-fashioned with big chunky bulbs— you know the kind? They have six different twinkle settings and I bought them off some faintly dodgy website called, like, Lights4Fun or something1. I don’t know: it was four in the morning, the end of November, I was buying stuff online just to make me feel better (as Leonard never said).
Anyway, they arrived, and they look like the kind of thing you would put round the bed of a three-year-old to coax her into sleeping in her own big-girl princess bed. In other words, perfect. I took them out of the box and, though they are of course for the tree, I unwound them and plugged them in and sort of strung them haphazardly across the sitting room. I just really needed to look at some twinkly lights, you know? I really needed some light.
I thought it would be helpful, maybe, to make a space here for those of us who find December….tricky. You may have missed the memo on this one, what with the elaborate 5000-word festive gift guide that went out last weekend, but I’m a real prickly girl when it comes to Christmas: I really love it; and also, it’s pretty much daily Shit Anniversaries for me. Not deaths, but everything but deaths. Tons of hospital shit. Tons of basic brutal trauma. A bunch of straight-up horror-movie flashbacks because the body knows that a bobble hat and a big scarf once meant be scared and fight harder and you’re going to lose, you know that? I did lose, I suppose, but also, the game just rolled right on over and kept on playing, and every year it happens all over and here we go again with the bloody ghosts and baubles.
Christmas with trauma is a difficult landscape: the dead marshes, basically, if everything above the dead faces was tinsel and inflatable Santas. Also, nobody can see the dead faces except you. You can tell people about the dead faces, for sure, and they will listen politely if they are nice; but mostly they will think you are being weird because, come on! Santa is here, and he’s inflatable! He’s holding an equally inflatable sign, and the sign says Ho Ho Ho! The sign says Happy Holidays! The sign says Get A Grip, It’s Christmas!
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