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I wish you were here
Good morning.
Merry Christmas.
I wish you were here.
There couldn’t be more people in my house right now
and I couldn’t feel more alone.
The guest room
where we played hide and seek when we were little
is now filled with overcoats
and unused umbrellas.
The bathroom
where I tried to shave your face once
is now filled with ugly Christmas hand towels
and funny air fresheners.
Dozens of voices
drift up through the rafters of my house,
but the absence of yours rings the loudest.
A hundred clammy handshakes,
a thousand lipstick-smacked kisses planted on my cheeks
can do nothing to ease my solitude.
I wish you were here.
All I can hear
is the horrible renditions of Christmas carols
from the little red radio in the kitchen
and I wish you were here to laugh and croak along to them
with me
like we were in a bad movie.
All I can smell
is the waxy Yankee candle on the coffee table
and I wish we were back at the candle store in the mall last
summer,
walking around and smelling all the candles
until our noses itched and burned
and then doing it some more.
I wish you were here
to go outside with me,
to take me to another world
where the cracked, hardened dirt is snow
and the dead, twisted tree branches are snowmen’s arms
asking us to dance.
If there was snow on the ground outside
it would be made of
my crystallized tears
from knowing you’ll never dance with the snowmen again.
I miss you,
and I hope that wherever you’ve gone,
the bathrooms are full of memories
instead of hand towels,
and the hallways are decorated
with my love for you.
Rest in peace.
Merry Christmas.
I wish you were here.
