Vignette #1
With his back against the San Francisco traffic, the world drips in molasses, the golden glow of Christmas sinks into amber. Lamp posts wrapped in strings of light like glittering bangles line the street washed in frostbitten moon and headlights. Garland, festive and fresh with the earthy smell of pine, hung off the rails of the bridge, which scratched his skin when he had urged his feet over. If he focused hard enough, a faint aroma of gingerbread and coco from down the road, and the bridge, sweltered at his shivering hands. But if he wasn’t focusing, which he wasn’t, it just smelt cold. The sky is dark with the rich blue of dusk and a dusting of soft, chilled clouds nearly shimmering. Maybe he would’ve thought it was beautiful, if he had recognized how it was the same hue of the night sky in the Christmas books he used to read to his daughters during this time years ago. He exhaled a waltzing fog of breath, reminiscent of the candles he let the girls blow out around the wreath, and shifted his heavy work boot feet – ice crunching beneath them. The families within their cars were laughing and humming to the jolly music singing from the radio, the air had a kind of warmness that couldn’t be felt on the skin – only inside. The world was blurred at the edges, a postcard dropped in a rain puddle. He was blind to it all. He was alone, purely and cleanly alone, setting out to join a demographic in a city foreign to his usual Christmas joy. With a family. And a warm living room housing a glowing evergreen littered with tinsel and baubles, with the crackle of firewood in the brick tower against the wall. There was talking. Behind him. A police officer, lingering behind him cautiously. Words of empathy being spoken into the thin air.
“Hey son, why don’t you talk this through with me?”
His teeth had grazed the sides of his cheeks, his tongue, and the taste of blood lingered carefully where it should be spiked eggnog and the cookies set out for Santa he ate for the illusion. He was stuck, trapped within himself. Believed there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. Just then the sky began to flutter and he looked up. Small glints of fluffy light flying through the air like little doves. Snow, it was snowing. The first snow of the year, and a rare snow at that. A snowflake landed on his arm and he watched as its intricacies relished, then melted. Bringing his eyes way up to the source, where the heavens frolicked, he watched it pour down in its daintiness. It washed over him then, a wave, a force. Something that felt like that living room back in his memory. Hope.
“It’s so beautiful.”
And he urged back off the cliff, toward the glitter wrapped lampposts, and merry garland. The gingerbread and the hot chocolate. The humming and warmly upturned lips.