An Ode to Empty Christmas Eves

It is Christmas Eve and I am driving along near barren streets. It is as if every car I see is a crop in a fruitless harvest, suprising, foreign, out of place.

I pass by houses with candles in the windows and trees in the living room. Most people stay in on Christmas Eve, but not everyone has the luxury.

Not everyone can go home.

The Chinese couple on Main who own a almost bankrupt tea shop cannot go home; they can't afford to miss the buisness.

The one customer inside the tea shop cannot go home; she can't face the family she knows is falling apart.

The older man at the bar next door to the tea shop with no family, already on his third scotch cannot go home; he cannot sit in an empty house and be haunted by what could've been.

The young vagabond outside the bar, smoking a cigarette, cannot go home; he doesn't know where it is.

And the young girl in the freezing cold of late December with needle marks down her arms, in the alleyway between the bar and the tea shop cannot go home; she has forgotten how to get there.

It is Christmas Eve and I am driving along a near barren streets.

Every light I see throuh a window is like a breath of air to my drowning body; it shows me someone is there, someone is home on Christmas Eve.

Every dark window that crosses my eyes is like another foot I am being dragged down; that means they are not home, and the magic of it all is already gone.

I am not driving anymore. I am in a coffee shop.

I am inside a coffee shop Christmas Eve with people who are not home.

It is strange because it is not that any of us cannot go home, it is that we do not go home.

I order my coffee that is too hot to drink and ponder all the reasons people cannot go home and do not go home.

I am inside a coffee shop Christmas Eve with silent strangers.

I sip my burnng hot coffee, not because I like pain, but because I need to stay awake.

For if I get too tired, I'll have to go home.

I do not go home.

I do not go home because I know if I'll do, I will in front of my Christmas tree and stare at the lights until they burn holes the size of universes into my eyes.

I know if I do I will be captive to my own experience.

I know if I do I will have to bear witness as my own innocense is stripped away.

#poem#deep#emotional#philosophy#christmas#holiday