On Christmas Eve

It was late on Christmas Eve that you had told me you would leave. The windows were filled with whirs of dark gray static and all I could think about was how cold my fingers were, pulsing with pain, flashing red and white. Your words had made me dizzy and then you were just gone and I’d lain down and clung fast to a pillow as once I’d have clung to you. Flashes of my childhood played on those window panes; black humour-filled cartoons that went way over my head and made feel so lost within myself. Mom came into the room and sat down next to me, all the cushions shifting round, and asked where you had gone and I had told her you’d gone out and weren’t coming back. She looked so disapprovingly, touched me gently on the shoulder and left me alone again; I cried only after she had closed the door, though mostly for myself. All night I watched those static screens play silent echos lit by the incandescent lamp above. I thought about that morning that we’d never have, sitting under that Christmas tree I had decked out with mom and dad, how we would sit around and share our presents with each other. I had bought a copy of that book you loved so much, a first edition with the author’s signature in deep black ink written there on the inside; it still sits in my bag beneath the bed. And we had made those sugar cookies, star-shaped, that you love so much and I hadn’t even seen you for two weeks and couldn’t wait to give them to you, to see your eyes light up as I had hoped, to hug you, hold you, have you around for all of Christmas break. You looked so tired too, your eyes looked cold and hard like rocks of hail and I had tried to hug you and you let me but you didn’t hug me back and I felt struck by fear as I have never felt before. I want to ask you when that hollow feeling will subside because you always know these things but now I don’t know what to do and cling onto my pillow and hope that by tomorrow some of that rushing noise will hopefully have gone away.