When Christmas Comes

I don’t know what it is about houses at night—houses with lighted windows in the dark of night—they always make me feel sad somehow, as if I’m lost out in the world alone and everyone else is safe and warm and together inside.

He had one more glimpse of them as he pulled the Jeep out: three figures captured in the headlights, a child clinging to a woman, a man with his arms around the woman’s shoulders, the snow coming down on them, man, woman, and child, like figures in a Christmas globe.

She was a woman who had clearly had practice in keeping her thoughts to herself.

It was all the same every year. And that’s how I liked it. I never wanted it to be different, not even a little bit. It’s funny. When you’re young, you always want things to change. You want to grow up. You want to go to new places, do new things. But in the end, it’s the things like Christmas, the things that are always the same, that you love the most.

And here May remained, thought Winter, all alone. And he felt for her. Because he was alone. Because it seemed to him just now that we were all alone in the end: hearts in space, drifting far and away from the impossible planet of the past.

We reveal ourselves in the stories we tell.

It made her seem almost - I don’t know - ghostlike.

I can't compete with the woman in your head, Cam. I don't even know if she's real.

She called out as she ran after them—called out to the child, not the father. She was shy about calling out to the father for some reason.

If she had rejected me then, it would have crushed me. If she had pitied me, I never would have recovered. But while what I saw in her eyes and in her face wasn't the reciprocal passion I hungered for, it was not an impossible barrier either. Her expression was saying to me Not now, but maybe someday. My love for her was wrong now—even I felt that, now that the moment of crisis had passed. I was too young. She was starting a new life. It wasn't our time. But that time might come. It might. It was possible. All of that was in her expression and in her eyes.

She was—I'm not sure how to best describe it—a receiving presence, not a giving one. You talked to her. She listened. Pretty soon, you found you had told her everything about yourself—and you felt better for it too. She had a wonderful soothing way about her. But she hadn't told you anything, nothing at all.

My parents had no time for me. Whenever they would come upon me in one of the rooms, they always looked startles, as if they'd completely forgotten I lived in the same house with them. If my mother came upon me by myself, a look of absolute panic would come into her eyes. She would ask, "Where's Nanny?" in this strained, high-pitched, near-hysterical voice. And when Nanny would return from wherever she was, mother would breathe an enormous sigh of relief. "Oh! There she is!" Clearly, for a moment, she had been terrified she was going to have to figure out how to mother me on her own.

Before you lose things, you don’t really know you can lose them,

She was struck, too, by how often in this sad life a person’s gifts are useless in helping him fulfill his true desire.