My First Christmas Alone

My First Christmas Alone

By Jake Stone

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to spend Christmas day completely alone. I remember hearing somewhere that the highest suicide rate is around the holiday season. By the end of tomorrow, will I feel like killing myself? Of course, someone like myself who grew up in such a big and supportive family doesn’t just get to spend Christmas alone just like that – it takes years of disappointing people, years of hurting people, years of convincing the very people who gave you love unconditionally that just maybe they were wrong all these years to do so. And so, here I am, lying in bed on the eve of Christmas wondering how I will feel tomorrow when I spend the day alone. I am fairly confident that I have squashed any hope of receiving a phone call from any of my family, and frankly at this point, I wouldn’t want it any other way. The only salvation to me right now is the idea that I have in fact hit rock bottom. The truth is I want to feel terrible tomorrow – I want to drown in my own self-pity. In order for me to have a reason to live, I need some sense of self worth and by enduring the entire Christmas Day completely alone – the one day in the year when no one is supposed to feel alone – my hope is to feel like I have sustained the amount punishment needed to be on my way to redemption.

11:45pm Christmas Eve : Can’t fall asleep yet. That would be too easy. To sleep through the first minutes of Christmas Day would be like cheating. I want to know how the first second feels. This is new to me – maybe I’ll break down and cry, maybe it will feel like any other night – maybe I’ll actually enjoy it. That wouldn’t be that much of a surprise to me because I do tend to like to feel sorry for myself. I know what I could do to not make it as bad as it could be – is to treat it like any other day. Maybe go see a movie, avoid Christmas movies/songs/tv shows. Disassociate myself from all things Christmas. But I don’t want to do that. Tomorrow morning, I am going to get dressed like I have somewhere to go, I am going to set the table with the best dinnerware I have as if I were having company over, I am going to bake a turkey as if I had people to share it with – and while I’m doing all this I’m going to have “Baby its cold outside” playing on repeat. Like salt in the wounds – sadistic, isn’t it.

12:01am Christmas Day Don’t feel any different than when it was 11:59pm. That figures – living in anticipation my whole life only to be disappointed in the end. Well, how about I get this over with right away, then. Are you happy with what you’ve done?