This Christmas

The top of the hydrangeas bobbed gently on their thin branches. The heavy clouds that presently filled the sky were departing stealthily and silently as if not to be caught. Such subtlety was in vain, however. The snow that descended from them nestled into every nook and burrowed into every cranny. Proof of their presence was evident even to the groundhog resting several feet underground. The whole world, as much as I could see from my bedroom window, felt like it was shifting and changing at every moment but at the same time everything was still. It was all strangely melancholic. As a child, I used to love playing in the snow. Like christened sand, pure and without blemish, I found the snow beautiful, yielding, soft. Now, the world felt heavier as if burdened with a weight that was too heavy to bear. Everything drooped and sagged. The colors of autumn which blazed so vividly the day before became softer, or rather, muted. The leaves on the ground curled upwards like dead insects. How long before their stems and edges were completely covered? How long before their existence was swallowed up by the indifferent force of nature? I sighed and the warmth of my breath fogged up the glass. I turned to the mirror to check my appearance. My nose was bright red like a certain caricatured reindeer and my flannel pajamas were creased in the most obscene places. Wretched and unkempt. Wrong holiday. I was stirred by the sight. I took my dry hand and wiped it over my similarly dry face. I leaned into the mirror again. My eyelashes were clumped into little spikes and teardrops clung to them like small beads of ice. In the glow of the Christmas lights they almost looked beautiful. 

The sound of rustling paper and laughter guided me as I walked down the hall. My mother was bent over picking up scrap pieces of wrapping paper and stuffing them into a large trash bag. I entered the room like an ill-intentioned Christmas spirit.

“Did you see?” She asked, smiling. “It started snowing.” 

“Yeah, I saw that,” I said awkwardly. “Where’s dad?” 

“He’s out in the garage.”

“Oh.” 

Discouraged, I turned around to return to my room but she stopped me.

“Here, your cousins are on the phone.” 

I grabbed the phone and mustered up all the goodwill that I could. I smiled and waved placidly. 

“Merry Christmas, you guys,” I said. My throat felt scratchy and it came out drier than I wanted it to. 

None of them seemed to notice. They are too busy fighting each other for a few seconds of screen time. 

“Merry Christmas! Is it snowing there? What did you get?!” They shouted interchangeably through the speaker. 

My tongue made a weird sucking sound as I tried to say something. Nothing would come out, so I just smiled, waved again, and then handed the phone back to my mom. She gave me a questioning look.  

To her phone, she said, “I’ll talk to you guys later.” To me, she asked, “What's the matter with you?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I’m just tired,” I said. 

She laughed again. “Tired of what? Opening presents and eating all day?” 

I didn’t have it in me to counter her. Without locking my knees, I fell backward onto the couch. She took my silence as indifference and continued humming and picking up the sparkly litter. 

The garage door opened and my father walked in, powdery snow covering his shoulders like a fuzzy shawl. He grinned at me from a distance and took off his boots. 

“Gotta get the salt down before it gets too cold,” he said to no one in particular as he came into the living room.  

There were snowflakes in his beard, winking like diamonds. 

There was a pause in the Christmas music playing in the background so I began although I wasn't sure how to start.

 “I need to talk to the both of you,” I said to them. 

“About what?” my mom asked in response. 

“I need to talk to you about me.” The way I phrased it was unlike me. They both felt it and I could feel their bodies tense. They were poised not to attack but to brace themselves for what would come. I continued. 

“Well, I wanted to talk to you guys about what I’m going to do with my future.”

 Still, they didn’t say anything. I was making it too big. I was losing my grip and it was about to fall right out of my hands. In my anxiety, I also felt a bit of indignation. I wanted to discuss my future with them. Did they even care? I don’t know if I did it for the shock factor or because I wanted to get the conversation over with, but I blurted it out. “I don’t want to go back to school next semester,” I said.  

My mom sighed and rolled her eyes and I flinched at her apathy. I would have preferred anger. That way I could lay out the defense I had so carefully constructed in my head.  

“Again?” 

“What do you mean again?”  

The wind was picking up speed and in the distance I could hear, somewhere, a trash can blow over. 

“What do you mean again?” I asked a second time. “I’ve never told you I don’t want to go back to school.”

“What about last year?” 

I paused. “That was a break. I didn’t technically leave.” 

She sighed again. “One minute you want to do this, the next minute you want to do that. I just wish you would be more consistent.” 

I could feel my emotions stirring unevenly inside of me. 

I desperately looked to my father but his eyes were fixed on the shining red ornaments on the tree. I was defeated before I could even begin. I stood up and looked around. Where could I go? Back to my room, to that image of the falling snow? Back to school? Back to enduring? Back to their ineligible grace? How could I sell a dream of passion to people to whom stability was the wildest and most fulfilling dream they could think of? 

“How about this? You don’t want to go to school, so what do you want to do?” my dad finally asked. The answer to his question was one that I wouldn’t have dared to give unbidden.

“I just want to explore my interests right now,” I said timidly. 

“Okay..like what?” my mom asked. She finally set down the trash bag, which was now full, and moved to the seat next to me.

“I guess writing would be one of them.”

She looked confused. “Don't you write at school?”

"Not that kind of writing," I said.

“You mean, write, like what? Books?” my dad asked.

“Well, maybe just stories at first,” I said, still looking at my hands. “I think maybe I would like to be a writer, kind of.” 

“Okay, but that’s not-” my mother started. 

“So, then what's your plan?” my dad interrupted. 

“Well…my plan… I just plan on, you know, writing a lot and being consistent, I don’t know.” 

“You don’t know?” my mom asked. 

It was hard for me to be assertive in conversations with my parents. I dumbed myself down to fit into the role of their child because if I wasn’t the naive child and them the all-knowing parents, then what exactly was our relationship?

“I’m just saying that I want to try. I want to try to see if this could be a possibility for me.” 

Finally, I found the words I had been searching for since I came home for break. Asking for permission to try something felt like a provocation. A battle of wills. I was asking them to let me try but in a way, I was daring them not to.

My parents kept looking at me but not as curiously as before. 

“I think you would be good at that,” my mom says, shocking both my dad and I. She pointed to him. “I’ve told you, she’s always had a mind like that. Creative, like me.” 

My dad nodded as if to say that he had noticed this and agreed. 

“Just give me, like, a year. If I don’t make any progress in a year, then I’ll go back to school.”

They both just sat there nodding, their attention once again trailing elsewhere. 

I rested my head on the back of the couch, exhausted. Through the big picture window, I could see that the final remnants of fall were gone. The markings of a new season were here. The snow continued to fall and I could feel the weight of it pressing in on the world. It felt like a blanket, telling the Earth to be still. It was time to rest.