The Christmas Tree

The Christmas tree is still standing in the living room. It’s Tuesday, January 23rd, my fourth full day without Hyacinth. Like Sylvia Plath’s tulips, the hideous tree stares at me with a horrible eye and an ugly splash of color. It eats my oxygen. But it doesn’t breathe. I know that. It hasn’t breathed for weeks. It hasn’t breathed since it was ripped from the forest, murdered for my enjoyment. It’s as dead as dead can be. It’s as dead as anything in this world. It’s as dead as my beloved. From its festive grave it screams at me. “Take me down! Throw me away! Move on with your responsibilities! The world didn’t stop when I died; the world won’t stop for you now!” It goads me with the necessity of picking myself up and moving on. It reminds me that today is another day, and that I must continue. I must put one foot in front of the other. I must eat, bathe, sleep, go to work – unlike the tree, I must continue to breathe. I hate the tree. I think I’ll let it stand there till it rots.

Today is an angry day. It’s my first one of those. I can’t keep track of all the details of my busy life - my big, fat, ugly, oh-so-important, stupid fucking life. I can barely keep my head above the water and it’s not enough. In 20 minutes I’ll be standing in front of a room full of students, preaching from the podium about the mysterious functioning of the neural impulse. They’ll bow down to me as they scribble my words in their notebooks for future regurgitation. It’s a day like any other, except that I still don’t have their class schedule figured out. I still don’t know the precise date of their first test. At this moment I can’t even remember where the classroom is. I’ll have to look it up again. Somebody will almost certainly ask me about the schedule; when is the first test? I’ll want to scream “It’s not today, so who cares?” But I won’t scream at them. I’ll apologize and say “I’ll have your calendar for you next time”. That will probably be a lie. That’s what I told them the last time they asked. The last time they asked was the day that Hyacinth died. Fuck the calendar. Maybe I’ll let it stand there till it rots too.

Next Chapter

Back to Table of Contents