The shortest day of the year brings a thunderstorm, pouring rain. My little one is awake; I heard him jump up to turn his light on, but recently he’s been enjoying the practice of getting back into bed, reading. Sometimes he calls for me to come in, and when I do, he says, “I just want to snuggle you,” and then after a bit, he releases me and tells me he’ll be out in a few minutes.
So for now I sit here, listening to the rain and watching the lights twinkle on the tree. When we put it up, just after Thanksgiving, we realized that none of the lights were twinkling and so my partner ran out and got some more that would, and it was a small thing but also a big thing, because now I have sat here every morning since then, watching the lights.
Love is, certainly, action.
Yesterday I went downtown and took my little dog and wandered in and out of shops. I bought a couple of things that I wanted to give as gifts, and then I found a giant garland made of sparkly bows so I bought that, too. I ran into a friend who I rarely get to see, and that was such a treat; the best kind of surprise. She was with her daughter, who is about to enter high school, who I have known since she was a very little girl, though I have not known her well enough. They bought a bow-garland too.
I saw a few teenagers I work with, and they came running out of a store to say hello. Coffees in hand, bright and bubbly, the personification of joy.
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And now, so suddenly, it is Christmas night. It is raining again, and as I hear the whisk of tires racing through the gathering puddles outside, I wonder about the people driving those cars, riding in them. Are they on their way home from a festive, joyful occasion, or perhaps on their way to some late shift somewhere, or perhaps running quick out for milk, gas, another bottle of whiskey? They are in some capacity my neighbors and yet just as they cannot see inside my house to glimpse my posture here in this living room, so too can I not imagine their stories, their destinations.
Although no, we are cut from everything the same, and so if we close our eyes, we might be able to picture it all, exactly.
I know a woman who at this moment is in labor, waiting for a son to arrive who was supposed to come in January. I cannot imagine her life right now, and yet, I can. This is a central part of empathy, isn’t it, the ability to step into someone else’s shoes for a moment, feel a sense of what they’re feeling, the excitement and the fear and the pain and the anxiety and the duality of total uniqueness married with the pedestrian moments of life. Perhaps she has had the baby by now; perhaps she is gazing at her child as I remember gazing at mine, understanding things about the world that I had no notion of before then: things I could not, and did not, touch until I felt the physical weight of the child in my arms, the part of my heart suddenly made external.
I do not understand how people cannot give one another grace, cannot give each other the room to be themselves, except to understand that people who are incapable of that were not given those same things by those who mattered most in their lives. Except to understand that under their anger is sadness, and to look those things straight in the face is far too frightening to do. So they spew what they spew instead, their judgment and rage, and hurt whoever they can hurt.
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So this is Christmas.
It was such a joyful one here, exactly what I wanted even though I hadn’t pictured it ahead of time. Gifts, gifts of time and thoughtfulness and a friend cutting my child’s hair outside in the back yard instead of in their house because her wife and her son are both sick. The gift of my little one’s smile, how he told me as we lay in his bed that I am his favorite person, how he told me he could gobble me up, how he called for me again and again, asking for endless snuggles. Can you snuggle me, he says, and I cannot say no, just as I cannot say no in the mornings after he turns on his light.
I/am so lucky/to have a child/asking for me.
My house is so warm, cozy with the heat of the fire in the woodstove, which is to my right. The rain outside is a comfort rather than a threat, a nuisance. The cars drive by and I hear the dryer tumbling a last load of clothes around and everything is made of the sound of comfort.
You could ask me a million times if I’d trade places with the wealthiest people in the world, and always my answer would be no. Ask me a billion times, even. A zillion.
I pause, watching the lights on the tree as they frantically blink their colors at me. And resolve to finish this piece and go to bed, where I will read, where I will dream.
The Wandering Introvert 