Day 41: Christmas Lights

It was snowing. The white powder rains from the sky as randomly as entropy would suggest. The layer of wet, cold, yet somehow enticing snow starts to form on the pavement, across the street, onto the tree and dropping on each last leaf of fall.

The row of light ranges between the trees was lit up, all the bulbs at one.

And at that very moment, she feels the stream of light shining through her mind. The happiness and peace that she was looking for so long shocks her, and she is overwhelmed in her own satisfaction. She stops her walk to starbuck. Her hair barely appears the brownish color that the sun brought her. She looks up, as she has in all of her life.

She was a little kid, born in a town that is so close, yet so far to the world outside. There seemed to be the endless flow of people, yet there seemed to be no one at the same time. She walked through the world trying to figure out who is “someone” and who is “no one”.

She assumed: “Well, my parents should be ‘someone’, because they care about me in my life.”

Then her mom started to go out on “business dinner”, the kind of dinner where she was told that people don’t just eat. She could count the number of times that she saw her mom before her curtail in a hand. She couldn’t even recall the last time she got to have something that her mom made, instead of the interminable plates of takeouts that her nanny could muster. Her dad didn’t even know about the absences, because he was not even remotely in the house. She was told he got a job oversea and he had to leave because the pay was good. She was told that he loved her and he would visit whenever possible. But she knew all that was a fat, obnoxious lie after three long years she couldn’t see him. She was stuck eating her cold takeout, alone, day by day, in an empty house.

She comforted herself: “At least, I’ll have my friends to be ‘someone’.”

She went to school and she desperately tried to not get in trouble, because that was the way she was taught by her nanny, to be a good girl. She thought getting all 100s was good, because afterall, that’s what she was told. She wanted to be good, so she would have someone. She wanted to have someone to ask her how her day is, someone to be proud of her achievement, someone to look up to her. Yet, all she had was the empty lunch table in the corner of her school’s dining hall, filled occasionally by people who just want her homework.

She realized she had gone through her whole life without having that someone, so much that she doesn’t even know what this “someone” is, and how having “someone” feel like. She cornered herself and built up her wall, so high and so thick, that she thought no one can break it.

But now she knows she was wrong. She was walking down the street with him, and he melts her heart to pieces. The wall she’s built didn’t keep him away. He might be this annoying kid who tries to ask way too many questions, but at least he cares. He makes her happy.

Maybe, just maybe, he’s her someone.

The magical Christmas lights come on, right in front of their very eyes.

                                                                                                                                       Sincerely,

                                                                                                                                       Denny