anonymousabraxas-blog

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Low-Key Lyesmith you old con

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Mark Gatiss on advice to prospective writers [x]

[anonymousabraxas-blog]

Snow drifts and Starbucks

Snow has a way of captivating the human imagination. It falls slowly, or quickly, in flurries, and in torrents wiping away everything underneath it in a clean blank sheet. I empathize with snowflakes- no not because I’m a millennial- because of its serenity. It comes down from what must, to the snowflake, seem to be chaos. It is brought into this world from water, condensed, frozen, and cast away from the womb of the snow cloud to drift alone through the sky. If I were a snowflake I would be terrified of the lonely fall down and I would be overjoyed upon the realization that waiting for me on the ground were a million others just like me.

               From the sightlines of a coffee shop the world seems a strange, busy, and almost predictable place- but from experience I can tell you that nothing is ever truly what it seems. It was Christmas eve of 2015 and I was enjoying a sight of snowdrifts from the drive thru window that I was working at. The occasional customer would drop in, order their favorite coffee, wish me a “Merry Christmas!” and go on their way leaving me with a strange pit in my stomach.

               My boss asked me what my plans were for Christmas and my only thought was “Try not to fall into an existential depression” but I told him I had no plans. There was no family for me to celebrate with, my few friends were out of town, and I was unsure as to what to say. I listened from the sidelines as people excitedly talked of presents and food, hopes, family, the typical Christmas bit. The young man in a Black Sabbath shirt wanted a new video game, his sister wanted an IPhone, and I am almost certain their mother simply wanted a vacation. I just wanted to make their coffee and end the conversation.

               The snow had subsided by the time our store had closed, the floors had been swept, the dishes cleaned, and we left for the night. “Merry Christmas!” my boss cried to me once again. I mumbled a vague reply that might have been somewhere between “You too!” and “Summer is my favorite season, holidays are depressing, and I am going back to an empty house tonight”. I turned on my car and waited for it to heat up, placed a bag in my backseat that was filled with otherwise wasted pastries, and turned on my music. I was not sad, to me it was just another day, but I was aware of my purposeful detachment to the merriment around me. If I remained aloof I could not be reminded that there might be something I was actually missing. You know the saying “It’s not about what you have, it’s about your attitude!” and all that jazz.

               My windows defrost, my coffee is still warm, my music is playing, and I leave the parking lot contently. Christmas Eve in the south means that nobody is outside- its family first and at night time you are not going to leave your family. So the roads were blissfully empty, the snow had been cleared from the roads mostly, and it seemed very quiet. It was 10 PM by the time I was almost home and I decided to pull into a 7/11 gas station and purchase a pack of cigarettes. I had heard a woman say once that cigarettes were the only thing that had never left her- I am inclined to believe her. I stepped back out into the an almost empty street and stared at a strange shadow which I quickly realized was a person. He had long unkempt hair, dirty skin, and his face was shoved into the backpack to stifle the sounds of his crying.

               I sat down next to the man, opened the pack of cigarettes, lit one, waited a few seconds, and then asked “Want a cigarette? It’s a bit cold out.” Choosing not to mention that he seemed like he could use it. The man’s sobbing came to a stop- which I was incredibly thankful for because I hate the way humans sound when they cry. He smoked his entire cigarette before saying a word.

               “You’re the first person to see me all day. Almost Christmas and not a single person even notices me. Can’t get a hold of my daughter in months, no phone to call her with, probably won’t even talk to me anyways, but it’s almost Christmas.” The man unloaded on me with a final breath of smoke.

               My mind flashed vaguely back to a speech from Neil Gaimans American Gods in which a certain god talks of how the week before Christmas is normally pretty empty in a mortuary. People tend to wait until after Christmas to die- just in case. I took a deep breath and asked “What’s your name?”

               “Mel.” The man replied, combing his hands through his hair and shivering.

               “Anything I can do for ya?” I asked, not quite sure what I meant but willing to go along with whatever happened.

               The man laughed and said “Not unless you feel like going on down to my daughter’s house. Lives forty minutes’ drive away- ain’t seen me since I been sober. Wish I wasn’t sober.”

               I thought about it for what might have been two seconds before saying “Yeah sure why not. Hop in the car.”

               Mel looked at me questioningly as I walked towards the car, unlocked the side door, turned on the heat, and waited. He began to scramble together all of his items which consisted of one tear stained backpack, three oversized jackets, two plastic bags of various items, and one white lighter- and placed them in the back of my car. He held his hands over the heat for a minute as he mumbled out his thanks. I asked him where his daughter lived and he gave me the address “Gotta memory for these things. People you care about. Numbers and things, you know?” He mumbled out.

               We began to talk on the drive down south, forty-five minutes south to be exact, and as he talked he asked about God. I told him that I believe in my heart that fundamentally if there is a being called God then we came from it- and are a part of it- and have never left it. If our identity is anything it must be that which we are made of- whether its stardust or consciousness. Mel nodded his head and said “On the streets we’re all the same, but I think they call people like you Angels they do. Christmas miracle.”

               Ignoring what I assumed was a compliment I stared out at the snow piling on the side of the road and smiled- knowing how everyone likes to think of snowflakes as unique. We were closing in on Mel’s daughter’s apartments, Mel was talking about Nam, and I was still thinking about snow. I pulled in through the front gates of the complex, followed Mel’s mumbled instructions, and parked. Mel stared blankly out from my window before turning to me and asking “Do you think she’ll be happy to see me?”

               While the inner monologue of my mind was screaming “Fuck me dude, how am I supposed to know?” I just told him what I knew he wanted to hear. A little bit of assurance “Of course! You’re her father!” a little bit of consolation “Besides you’re sober now!” and a pinch of Christmas cheer “Besides, what better of a gift could she receive than family?”. Though, let’s be honest, sometimes the last thing you want to see is family and I was nowhere near as positive of what I was saying as I led him to believe.

               He led me to the door of her apartment and he knocked. We waited. Mel knocked again. We waited, he tapped his feet. He knocked, we waited. Mel sat down on the cold ground and began to cry. Panicking at the sight of raw human emotion I quickly grabbed my phone and asked “What’s her number??”.

               After a minute or so his breathing calmed and he told me her number. We called- no one picked up. Mel took a deep breath and we called again- we had reached the voicemail box of….

               All around us were shimmering multicolored lights- dangling, draped, and glimmering in the night. The snow had begun to fall again and the air was getting colder. Mel began to tell me about how you could survive a cold night if you stayed in a dumpster- it was warm, enclosed, better than nothing, and certainly better than Nam. I smoked a cigarette to keep myself from wondering how I arrive in these situations.

               We had sat in the cold, silent, night for almost an hour as hope of his daughter having a Christmas reunion were fading. It was a little past midnight and it was officially Christmas though neither of us mentioned it. Mel told me about how beautiful his daughter was, how smart she was, how great of a person was and I thought of the fact that parents normally see their children through a rather unique perspective. Smoke still coiled out from my lungs, a testament to my remaining willpower as it also burned down to the core. I began to hope I had not driven this man out to the middle of nowhere just so that he could receive that final blow that sent him over the edge. I mean, shit, he had survived Nam but that might have been easier for him than spending Christmas alone in a dumpster.

               My phone rang and a panicked female voice answered it and asked “Hello? Mel! Father? I haven’t heard from you in months! Dad?”

               I awkwardly handed the phone over to Mel who began to cry and explain the situation, as he told her about how the snow hurt, as he explained that people don’t see you when you live on the street. She would be right home she told him- he had Grandkids to see, and of course he was welcome to stay with her. I began to think that maybe he had been right about his kid, she seemed kind.

               I never met his daughter, and I never replied to the text messaged “Thank you!” or voicemails she left. I left Mel with the bag of pastries I had brought from work, shook his hand, and drove away. I floated my way home, head wrapped in cold clouds, when my phone rang. I put it on speaker and heard my friend say “Merry Christmas!! Of course, you’re still up. I need some help!” I don’t even remember what it was that she needed but I think it had to do with a laptop. She needed a chord or something to play a movie, can’t remember now. I can remember pulling into her driveway, I remember handing her the chord, and I remember being thankful that regardless of what my intentions for Christmas had been this is where I ended up. She did not seem too surprised when I told her what I had been doing, said it seemed like something I would pull. So, I found myself having floated a long way from where I had been at the start of my journey home that night watching snowfall from the drive thru window. I’m still not a fan of the cold, a bit too thin for that,  but now when I think of snowflakes falling on their lonesome journeys I do not think of the freeze into being or the fall into loneliness- I think of the company of those waiting to catch me and I think of the beauty of melting back into the earth with those around me.

-AnonymousAbraxas