12.22.17

The holidays are coming. and I don’t want them to. I don’t want to sit around an overcrowded table where the c-word is passed around as casually as the salad bowl that circulates. I thought I learned to accept this, I thought I was living with this, but I really wasn’t living with this until I stepped my foot in the door with all of my bags, ready to buckle down and call this house “home” for a month. Here the c-word is the harsh reality, evident in the calendar marked up with doctor’s appointments, the medications that have turned the dining table into a drugstore, and the year-long supply of both chocolate and vanilla Ensure taking up the entirety of the fridge. Popping in here every week was nothing compared to moving back and I now laugh at all of my panic attacks I had while sitting in my driveway, bracing myself to walk right into a story I didn’t want to be written. It’s one of those things that you genuinely think will never happen to you, until it does, and then you’re stuck with it and you don’t know what to do with it; as if someone just came, dropped off a shit ton of baggage loaded with padlocks and chains and bells and whistles, and gave no information of the context, no indication of the baggage’s destination, no hint of where the keys are. And now this baggage is ours to deal with, ours to thank others for prayers and “get well soon” cards, ours to handle with care and ignorance of the discomfort, ours to live with when none of us wanted this in the first place. If Krampus had come and kidnapped me, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between hell and home. “There’s no place like home for the holidays,” yes, there truly isn’t. Merry Christmas.