Out of Love

I love him like I love California - every second of every minute is infused with a golden shock of electricity that could light up those horrendous holiday lights they wrap around palm trees. More importantly, our shock of electricity powers our relationship and makes us invincible and permanent, a holiday of high temperatures and warm hearts, but in a way that outlasts 2023. The year we were married.

I wasn‘t supposed to make it to thirty. My life expectancy is technically reduced in quite a large way, with a 15% mortality rate. I moved to California five years ago, wanted to move back home after two. But then I found love, and love inspired marriage, and now I celebrate Christmas with boundless happiness.

I was snowed in two feet under one Christmas in Boston, out of love and out of luck. I understood winter to be infinite, that love equated to loss. I couldn’t leave my house; the snow plows piled it all up. An aching, a separateness from everyone else.

California Christmases are interesting - a blend of warmth, and palm trees, with an almost dream-like quality. But it’s me who’s dreaming - of a better future, for having met my husband.

California is one thing, family is another. I am lucky to have found mine here. I am lucky it only snows somewhere else, far away, where love was lost, and now entirely forgotten.