It's Christmas Eve, and I'm reading my students' journals. It's ok, they know I do this; I'm not invading anyone's privacy or anything. I have a big stack of them that I haven't graded and I've got to do it and I can't sleep at all, and Miracle on 34th Street is the only thing on, so now's as good a time as any, I suppose.
One of them caught me a little off guard and like a lunatic I'm posting to craigslist.
It's one of my favorite students. She's a sweetheart; thinks I'm hysterical, loves writing, and has had a crush on this boy all year. He asked out her best friend, and she's miserable about it. This happens every year, by the way, if you teach seventh grade, which I do. All the girls become obsessed with one boy. Last year it was Kapena. This year it is Lucas.
Lucas, Lucas, Lucas. He asked out her friend (I have her, too; not nearly as great a catch--no style, never stops chattering, total ditz but obviously will let him go a lot further with her, if you know what I mean) a month ago and it's been nothing but long faces since then. Poor girl. She writes pages and pages about it and I know exactly how she feels and I want to tell her it's okay, things will be ok, she'll meet someone eventually and he'll be wonderful and he'll ask her out instead of her friend, because she's beautiful and sweet and smart and sensitive and a lovely, lovely girl and of course some boy will love her, eventually. I really can't write that to her, though. Not sitting alone, grading journals in my studio apartment on Christmas Eve, posting on craigslist like a total dork.
She is twelve, this girl, and the entry she wrote this week veered off from good ol' Lucas and instead mourned the loss of Santa. She wrote that no matter how hard she tried she couldn't believe in Santa anymore, and she feels so, so old.
Neither twelve nor twenty five is really old, I guess. I laughed at her a little, the way I always do when the kids say something with all that gravitas and it just kills me. The way you're probably laughing at me right now when I say no matter how hard I try I can't believe in Christmas anymore, and it makes me feel so, so old, too. And I'm finding that if I can't believe in Christmas, it's nearly impossible for me to believe in much of anything.
I am going to be completely alone this Christmas. I couldn't afford a plane ticket home. I could, I suppose, but I really wanted to use last year's savings to start my Roth IRA, and all that sensibleness alone makes me feel fucking ancient. I told myself that it didn't matter; I've spent Christmas away from my family before, and I have friends here so it isn't a big deal, but then all of my friends ended up going away at the last minute and suddenly it's Christmas Eve and my last friend left yesterday and I'm grading journals in my pajamas and tomorrow there isn't going to be anyone.
This didn't seem like such a catastrophe until about two hours ago.
And yes, I'm being ridiculous, there are billions of people in far worse misery than this; this isn't even misery at all, what this is is self indulgent whining, and yes, I should go volunteer at a soup kitchen or something tomorrow (where do you find these places? Soup kitchens and things? Places to keep silly fake adults with no sense of perspective humble?) And I suppose it is awfully melodramatic to say you don't believe in Christmas and you're starting to suspect you don't believe in love anymore, either, since you're pretty and stylish and sensitive and funny and a lovely, lovely girl, too, and the last boyfriend was two years ago and since then you've had, what, two dates? Seventh graders trying to fix you up with their older cousins while you wonder, I never even told them I was single, how the hell do they know?
There is a bottle of wine in my fridge and I'm going to drink it, I think, and tomorrow I will awake with a hangover, and for some reason hangovers are very hopeful, I've always found, on the very rare occasions when I drink. And then I'm going to resolve to not let this happen next year. I may still not have anyone to love next year, and I may still not believe in Christmas, but I'm going to find something to volunteer for so I'm not publishing nihilistic personal ads on craigslist and being The Most Cynical 25 Year Old In The World.
I wonder if I googled soup kitchens if I could find one and they would take me on such short notice. That's got to stop me from dying with a sprig of holly in my heart. . .