Christmas no more, but a Garden

I dream of Christmas. More than I’d like. It always makes me sad after. The chasm between us. The intimacy in a dream. Us, as close as we once were. So very close. My lighthouse. My port of call. Just me and Christmas some days. And briefly, after these dreams… That Christmas has returned to me. But no. I wake. For real. And Christmas is as far away as ever.

We’d met, before it all, at an art exhibition.

He looked a little like Mos Def as Chuck Berry. Wild hair. And he was short.

Compact. But boy, he wasn’t short on charisma. And maybe, for me, who knows. It could have been love at first sight for all I’d grown cynical. No. Not cynical. Guarded. Shy. Afraid to love something, someone. Anyone. Bipolar can do that to a gal. If ya lose enough loved ones ya thought would last a lifetime. But I fell for Christmas. I just couldn’t help myself and fell hopelessly.

Christmas said he had a painting he wanted to give me, or ‘artwork’. I imagined a small sketch, a doodle. I’m not sure entirely what I expected. But it wasn’t what I got. The next day he came over and unveiled her. A framed painting. Not too small. Just right. With a bionic arm upon which a blackbird was perched. Red dress. A garland of red flowers in her hair I immediately imagined to be bold red carnations. Hispanic. Cropped black curling locks. And an unapologetic gaze.

How was he to know how she would resonate? But resonate she did. And more. I hung her in my lounge in the prime position above my old-surgical-trolley-turned-liquor-table. That way I looked upon her most evenings as I reclined on my comfiest sofa with a glass of cheap box wine. I wasn’t yet myself. I felt low. Deflated. Talentless.

But looking upon her, Woman with Blackbird, for that is all we called her, and truly, looking upon her I grew stronger, and stronger still. Meanwhile my feelings for Christmas too grew stronger and stronger still.

I

knew he was infatuated with another. I knew her well. And she was talented. And she was tall. And she had brown eyes that danced like butterflies. And the round face of a doll’s. And the soft skin of a falling rose petal. But she walked around in army issue boots and oversized trench coats and at parties she got high and climbed trees like it was nothing.

No wonder he was mad about her.

We all kinda were.

Even though I knew that Christmas was really mine.

Unspoken, we just knew.

But brown butterflies, she took her own life in the end. Young. It haunted me. For not all have a Woman with Blackbird. I stopped dreaming about Christmas and started dreaming about falling rose petals. But I’ve dreamed of Christmas again.

A memory.

In a bar.

He takes the loose string on my straw handbag and wraps it securely, protectively, around the clay toggle like he once did. Always looking out for me. Christmas always did things like that. A gentleman. A good guy. A great guy. Taking the returnable beer bottles out back at the gallery so that the vagrants could claim them and get a few bob for their troubles to buy a loaf of bread. That kinda thing. Once I turned up at the art gallery in tears and Christmas simply made me a cup of tea and sat with me in silence until I was ready to talk.

A teacup in a storm I told him. He was always that little teacup in a storm.

There were times, the two of us watching movies at mine, just the two of us, I could almost feel the electricity, sure I wasn’t imagining it. But Christmas wasn’t for the taking. For all I’d never wanted anything more. And yet, not. I knew better. For I loved him all the more.

His mother had received a message, loud and clear, to bear more children. And so she did. And of this prophesied second lot, the first was the love of my life born on the very same birth day of the Son of God. My Christmas.

And you just couldn’t deny it. There was just something about Christmas. I couldn’t even contemplate kissing him for all it felt as tantamount to an unholy act. The platonic realm between us the most sacred. In him, my sanctuary, sacrosanct.

And so I kept it that way.

And in the end, a manic episode, sometimes my curse, well it tore us asunder, a chasm now, no longer my sanctuary, my teacup. But that is okay.

For I have come to find it in a wild garden of milkwoods and clover and dandelions and nasturtiums and a bumblebee.

For all I still dream of Christmas. And I never did teach him to swim.

Still Life With Teapot Ad Book Painting by Miroslav Damevski