christmas eve alone
fiction, a christmas tale
fiction—
One is not really supposed to be alone on Christmas Eve. One is considered a sad sack or a loner if one doesn’t have a large family or ones’ own children to spend it with. But solitude is the most religious way of being. Loneliness is one of life’s oldest feelings, the one that joins us at birth, and lingers with us at our deathbed. And even though she was by no means Christian, she felt she understood this truth deeply, and so, she canceled all her plans and decided to stay inside and work on Christmas Eve.
There is an elaborate recipe online to make the perfect egg salad that involves whipping your own mayonnaise. She’d always wanted to make some, but it was too lengthy for weekday meals. But Christmas Eve was the perfect time. The bakery down the street even had a Christmas special selling Japanese milk bread. She made a large egg salad sandwich using eight eggs, and then, she sat down to write.
It was really so nice to be alone. From outside the window came the repetitive crowing of a single, solitary bird, maybe a crow. Maybe that would go in a poem. She had been working on a hybrid poetry collection, reportage and poetry, each poem set in a subway station across Queens, with each starting in the same way; “FLASH OF A METROCARD, BODY HITS THE TURNSTILE, KEW GARDENS/UNION TPKE E” or “FLASH OF A METROCARD, BODY HITS THE TURNSTILE, STEINWAY STREET R.” Her plan was to end each differently. But she hadn’t quite figured out how to get to the end. Actually, she had been trying to get to the end for a long time.
She used to procrastinate by hanging out with other poets, but she had to pull the plug on that whole ordeal very quickly. Other poets were distracting and flashy in their aliveness, everything was loud and deafening, they had too much to say and were always saying it. There was no distance allowed, even though distance was the heart of poetry. That, and the only reason to engage with contemporaries was if there was a market for poetry, and there was no market for poetry, it was much more dignified to engage with dead writers and try and enter the canon.
And she was dignified. Surprisingly, enough time spent alone made her contemporaries seem as distant as Blake and Shelley, and she had even started to be inspired by their work. Her best shot at finding the end of her collection was to spend as much time alone as possible, so that everyone seemed distant in reflection, small and far-away and losing enough detail to be properly engaged with.
She wrote by an old, thick-glassed window. Between words, she would take bits of her egg sandwich, which was much more delicious than she’d expected it to be, aromatic with scallions, cracking with black pepper, smooth and satiny and a little sweet in the right parts. The egg sandwich began to distract from her writing. It was really delicious, and the milk bread was incredibly soft and milky.
Outside, it hadn’t grown fully dark yet, and an electric wire hung from the roof of the apartment opposite, casting a shadow onto its brick facade, swinging back and forth the wind. After a minute of this, a stray cat appeared on the sidewalk square just outside her window, pacing back and forth. It was part of this group of stray, light gold and white cats that seemed to be related to each other, but this cat was very different than its family, because it seemed extremely feral. It had matted fur, and a crazy hypnotic look in its eyes, and a dark, angry look on its face. She got up off her chair and crouched close to the window, pressing her face against the cold glass.
Closer, the cat looked even more wild and free. Its nail was growing sideways out of its paw, and every time it paced in her direction, she could see that its small face had near disappeared into the grizzled, rough fur that surrounded it. No one could tell what it was thinking. It seemed like it owned itself. And then, suddenly, the cat went down on its haunches, tucking its paws in close to its stomach, facing, directly, the window, and her.
Did it see her? It could go either way. The glass on the window was thick enough that it obscured the people inside, but the cat was looking in her exact direction. Its eyes were a troubled hazel and its expression, which had seemed so hardened before, complexified. It seemed as if the cat was apologetic, almost, for being in this body, or like it was prostrating in obeisance before some unknown entity. Its sadness was like one, long drawn-out note, and it was in communion with something very far away and distant. Someone had once said that cats were the best friend of all poets, because they understood solitude more deeply than any other animal on the planet.
Someone had also said that cats believe that eye contact is a method of establishing domination. It was best to look away often to show that you wanted to be friends with them rather than beat them. She moved her head into and away from the window sill. Something seemed to pass between the two. The cat softened its shoulders a little bit, and its forlornness seemed to disappear, replaced by some recognition in its eyes of her. She said out loud, “Jesus, it’s saying: Can you adopt me?”
She stood up quickly, grabbed her winter coat and boots, and ran outside. But the sound of the opening storm door seemed to interrupt the cat’s reverie and the temporary hold they had on each other. It turned its back on her quickly, lunged for something invisible on the curb, and examined its own paw. And then, without looking back, it walked away, down the block, growing smaller until she couldn’t see it anymore.
After that, she went back inside. She couldn’t write at all and her egg sandwich was finished. She called up her friends, wore a pretty dress with some glittery stockings and nice perfume, and had a good time. She enjoyed Christmas Eve very much, drank too many glasses of spicy, sweet cider, and woke up the next morning with a hangover. In bed, head aching, she came up with a new theory that she thought might help her finish her poems. Yes, people were a lot when they were alive, but that was sort of the point of the whole messy thing, wasn’t it?