Ghost of Christmas Past

I woke up this morning feeling like I was missing something, but I wasn't really sure what. I laid in bed for a little while and then went and opened the french doors. It's cold outside, too cold to do this, but I crawled back into the warm bed and l pulled the blankets over me, letting the down comforter swallow me.

This time last year I was living in Las Vegas, still married but sensing that the end was near. I'd gone out shopping, bought her things that were beyond our means, just to justify the money we'd made, the way we'd made it. I looked down at the Las Vegas strip, my head pressed against the window and I thought "I wonder where I'll be for Christmas next year". I remember it vividly; the sun just starting to set, I could see my reflection in the floor to ceiling glass in front of me and I looked tired, sad and it caught me off guard to see myself this way, the face that looked back and me was not my own. This was not my life. The beautiful woman wandering around in the next room, she wasn't my wife. These things we'd collected, they didn't belong to me.

The packages I'd wrapped were all stacked beneath the Christmas tree that I'd had shipped from near where we'd grown up in Michigan (real trees are hard to come by in the desert). She'd decorated it without me, but maybe I told her too because I knew she would've anyhow. She put forth more of an effort than she had in Christmases past, but it was too little, too late and we weren't coming together for Christmas, but instead proving just how far apart we'd moved from one another.

When the friends she had invited over for dinner cancelled because they were having problems of their own, I was relieved. I was tired of holiday's being about entertaining at our place. I wanted it to be the two of us, but having it that way only because the guests said no made me feel like it was a cheap consolation prize.

We opened gifts and then went out to see the lights, fountains, flowers, and holiday decorations at the Bellagio. It wasn't a bad day, but it felt like the last holiday to be shared between two people that knew it was over. I felt as though I was in the movie Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind, that she was my Clementine and we'd given up on running, that Christmas had been the last place I'd tried to hide her before realizing that it would all be over soon and I should just try and enjoy it.

So I did. We went home and I held her hand while we laid on the couch with the dog nuzzled between us and we watched terrible Christmas movies together. That's all I ever really wanted for Christmas anyhow.