You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.

Acceptance, when it comes, arrives in waves: Listen with your chest. You will feel a pendulum swing within you, favoring one direction or another. And that is your answer. The answer is always inside your chest. The right choice weighs more. That's how you know. It causes you to lean in its direction.

My mistake was in underestimating the emotional force of a song you have already hear a thousand times.

Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.

My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.

I remember, no matter how impossible it seemed that any given day would end, it always did. This one would, too.

Most everybody had made at least one bad, drunken decision in their lives. Called an ex at two in the morning. Or perhaps has a little too much to drink on a second date and wept inconsolably while revealing how simply damaged one was, while nonetheless retaining an uncommonly large capacity for love. That kind of thing was, while regrettable, at least comprehensible. But waking up with someone generationally inappropriate, like your grandfather's best buddy?

I loved most when his eyelashes twitched and he blinked, and suddenly happiness was there inside his eyes. Unmistakable. Like a single word printed on a clean white page.

George had been surprised by my ability to leave him. He had not seen that in me.

Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer. Glen had been born on the day after Christmas. "My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that's all," he explained. But we knew this was a lie. Glen's parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers.

As a young child I had Santa and Jesus all mixed up. I could identify Coke or Pepsi with just one sip, but I could not tell you for sure why they strapped Santa to a cross. Had he missed a house? Had a good little girl somewhere in the world not received the doll he’d promised her, making the father angry?” (p.3)

I had always had the oddest feeling, consider it knowledge, that if I were ever to find myself inside the cockpit of a 767 with two dead piolets and afew hundred passengers in the cabin behind me, I would absolutely be able to land the ninety-thousand-pound jet.

It's not that I was an outright nitwit of a child.

Maybe one of my problems is I never depend upon the kindness of strangers.

I said all the wrong things. Except when I was busy saying all the mean ones and in the end I hated everybody and everything.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I hated drinking to the point that I misplaced really big slabs of time.

My grandfather blasted in. "Aw now, hell, carolyn, don't go twisting the boy back up in knots all over again now that you finally got him straightened out. They aren't leprechauns, son. they're elves. Leprechauns are those little drunk motherfuckers from Ireland.

Not the random, seemingly drunken hand of Mother Nature herself. That crazy old bitch gave us the California Redwoods - true, but right along with it she whipped up some naked mole rat.

It does not matter whether or not those responsible for harming you ever understand what they did, care about what they did, or apologize for it. It does not matter. All that matters is your ability to stop fondling the experience with your brain. Which you can do right now. A good therapist can help by preventing you from spending time wallowing in the past and instead focus on organizing your future.

The only time it was okay to drink Kahlúa was if you were thirteen, your parents were out of town, and you needed something to break the ice so you could have sex with your homeroom teacher. Kahlúa was medicine for teenagers; not a drink for grown-ups.

You know, American alcoholics are pretty fucking hard to insult.