But I don't think Christmas is coming.

I haven't been able to write about this yet. Now I have to.

---

I saw an old friend the other day, one of my best. Corey Holmes. I hadn't seen her in about thirteen, fourteen years. She came through my line at work and lit up when she recognized me.

I had to ruin the moment, of course. It was necessary, turning that beautiful look of pure joy to one of horror in seconds.

I had to tell her Jeanette was dead.

---

Do you remember your first kiss?

No, think back -- do you really remember it? Do you remember where you were, how you were standing, if they closed their eyes, the angle of your two bodies intersecting. The color and quality of the light. The scent of their body, the taste on your lips?

I do. It was more than half my life ago. It could have been yesterday.

I was madly in love with songhawk once, when we were little better than children, and I remember that kiss and all the breathless stolen moments that followed.

I threw her away, one day, for the sake of someone I thought I loved better. I didn't know anything.

We never would have made it. I know that. Several people have told me that over the years, not least of all Jeanette herself, for all kinds of reasons, not the least of them being her devotion to Christ and my agnosticism. And I can't regret the loves we each found in our lives. But leaving her was a mistake, and I couldn't help but wonder sometimes, if I had my life to live over --

I don't know. I still don't know anything.

---

She was supposed to be home soon. She'd moved to Texas, for the sake of her husband and child, but was supposed to be home for Christmas, you see.

She'd always been asthmatic. When flu turned to pneumonia, it took her down in a day. They had her on an artificial lung, and they restarted her heart twice, but. She died on Tuesday, December 16th, at four in the morning, before her mother could reach her to say goodbye.

---

I don't have any of her letters. I gave them up a couple of years ago. She had terrible handwriting, you see. Only wrote in pencil, when we were teenagers. So these letters, folded and kept, had faded to illegibility, so I reluctantly got rid of them. I shrugged it off at the time; it didn't matter. I was more interested in our future as friends than I was in our past.

Now our past is all I have, and I went through my keepsakes looking to see if there was anything, a note, a scrap, I might have overlooked, any piece of paper that might remember the touch of her hand the way my skin does. There wasn't anything.

There were pictures. Too few of them, but there were pictures, back from when it was always springtime. There's one in particular, precious and clear, of the two of us looking into each other's eyes as if there isn't anything else in the world.

I thought of scanning it in so you could see it.

But I'm not going to. It's mine.

---

At her going-away party, before she left for Texas, I had the weirdest feeling, in the back of my mind, like I wasn't going to see her again.

I ignored it. I was being ridiculous -- of course she'd come back up here for a visit, or I'd go down there someday. Something.

No more somedays. But I look back on that going-away party, and I can't think of anything I wish I'd done or said different. Maybe hugged her a little longer.

I could have been a better friend to her, I suppose, over the years. Spent more time with her. But there's nothing we left unsaid. I'm grateful for that.

---

The past week has been strange. I've curled up crying at no provocation; I've forced a smile on my face for my job; I've screamed out my anger at God; I was out with friends at the club on Friday and drank and laughed and kissed all the pretty girls, and oh, how I needed it. Every little moment seems knife-edge important. And I suppose it is.

Yesterday was good. Yesterday I arranged with Corey to get together with me and kickaha, someone else who'd been wondering for years what the hell ever happened to her. I didn't tell him who we were meeting. It was a surprise, a gift, maybe the best one I'll give this year.

But today Christmas is really here, and I don't want it. Jeanette was going to be home for Christmas. This can't be it.

---

There must have been a last kiss. I don't remember it.

---

At the end of Little Drummer Boy, Bing Crosby says to David Bowie, "It's a pretty thing, isn't it?"

Thank you, God, or whoever's listening. Thank you for all the pretty things.

Yes, in March.

See, my family has this weird tradition with Christmas "stockings" -- we don't have the normal stocking, you see, but a bag of loot the size of a pillowcase, filled with trinkets and ephemera. Everything from candy (always welcome) and gift certificates down to, well, bars of hotel soap and individual soy sauce packets. Going through it all is a daunting task and isn't terribly rewarding. No one in my immediate family seems to still enjoy this tradition -- except my mother. And since she does, we keep doing it.

(Actually, I suppose my sister still gets some enjoyment out of it, in a perverse game of escalation and retaliation. Similarly, my father has admitted to taking the items he received in the previous year's stocking and distributing them to everyone else's stocking.)

So I finally sat down with the most recent stocking this morning and sorted everything out into three piles: Things I Kinda Want, Things That Might Possibly Be Useful to Someone Else (i.e., the charity pile), and Things That Are of No Conceivable Use to Anyone. Guess which pile was the largest?

At least it's out of my way, now. But I'd feel more of a sense of accomplishment from getting this done if I didn't know that there were still bags filled with previous years' stocking contents lurking in my closet somewhere, like unexploded mines.