My Last Few Ruined Christmases

Christmastime. The year before had been a banner birth of Christ. She’d gotten me a Playstation 2, the small kind, which was a hell of a thing to get someone you’ve only been dating for five months. I remember thinking that my gift was really puny in comparison, she blew me out of the water.

There was a time, a few years before, when I was trying to hold my then-girlfriend up with her legs wrapped around me and get down in the same room that I was now receiving an extremely expensive piece of electronic equipment.

This Christmas, she would get me shirts for my “new job,” which was a sparsely-scheduled instructor position. Shirts and a tie. I felt so grown-up, and in a bad way. She offset that by getting me a little mechanical bull. Not a miniature riding kind, but a small robotic bull that, when you’d make a loud noise, would play a song and walk around, it’s little robot legs working in syncopation, its little head bowed obstinately, horns marching steadily forward, as if it could take out any dresser or housepet that got in its way. That helped bring the boy back into me.

So she got me the system, back then, and she got me a game I’d been wanting to play, not much one for videogames but into this thing anyway. She barely saw me for a month after that, I was playing the game so much. On the day that I reached the last level, having woken up early in the morning and picked up the controller out of compulsion, I called in late for work so I could get to the end. Later, she’d say that my always being late was something she came to resent in me.

Hell, I’m always late. It’s not like I try to be, I just am. People who are on time just don’t get it.

Now we’re supposed to be friends again, and Christmas is coming up. Before we split, I was planning on making something for her, and I still have all the components for it, but I’m not sure if she’d accept it. I’m not sure we’re getting gifts, even.

I want to show her I’m not the dirtbag she thinks I am, and she puts so much value in material things, she’s so very, very American, that I could do it come Christmas, if we were still on terms that would allow some commercial kind of interaction. I want her to see me how I am, and how she used to. I want her to see this thing she’s in is a temporary thing, it has to be, because she belongs with me. I want to get her that fucking ring.

She came to my family dinners, these last few holiday seasons, and I took her there not because I was dating her, but because I wanted my family to like my partner. My partner. The person I was going to spend my life with. This is getting mopey. I wanted to marry the girl, and I wanted my family to like the girl I would marry. It’s as simple as that. It should mean something to me that she never wanted me to meet her family, that even when I volunteered to do so, she still stopped it from happening. It should mean something to me that she’s already introduced this slimy motherfucker to everyone, and that they all like him, and that they hate me now more than ever, and that of course they hate me they have to hate me it’s the only way it makes sense. Is it because I’m white? I get the feeling if I was brown, none of this would have been such a big issue.

In the days leading up to that second Christmas together, we’d been fighting a lot, and she kept holding those presents hostage, saying she’d throw them away or take them back. It was all I could do not to tell her that she could go the fuck ahead, that things things things don’t mean anything to me. Of course, I didn’t want her to do any of that, because I desperately love presents. I went to her house after a bad one, to try and patch things up, and she brought out all my presents in bags, in glossy shopping bags, big smile on her face and that warmth, that wonderful warmth she had with her always. I got upset, and said that it was because I didn’t have anything to give her, but mostly it was because I was guilty for not having even gone shopping for her gift yet.
We started fighting again. I think I grabbed her at one point, by the coat. I drove her a few blocks toward my house, turned around to take her back home, then we drove around the block so we could fight in the car. She got mad and jumped out, started throwing the bags across the sidewalk and onto a lawn. Huge arcs from the truck to the grass, red and green shiny paper, sailing through the air as cruel as anything. I could hear things impacting, getting damaged. It made me depressed. I stopped her from throwing out the last bag, selfishly aware that I didn’t want her to break any potentially fragile things that should be mine, and she started to walk back to the house. I tried to stand in her way, to talk to her, and she slapped me.
I never take that. I walked back to the car, her begging me to stop and talk to her. I almost drove off, I think, without saying anything, but didn’t. We got in the car and I took her back to her house, she needed to drop off something before we left again, or check in at home. Something. I waited for her outside her house, waited for her to come back, even though I knew that she didn’t like me doing that, right in line of sight. It always upset her parents. It really never seemed like I was making any headway with them.

I think, sometimes, about what I’m going to say to them someday, the parents. Will they even listen to me if I try to explain that I’m sorry for who I was, and what I did? That I love their daughter and that my efforts from now on will only be toward her happiness, and that all this fighting and screaming and broken things things things was a fluke, a mistake, a horrible vicious circle that was allowed to spiral unchecked and out of control? Would they even listen?

Would they, come Christmas, be at my house?

I’ve done this, I’ve made myself this, so we could be together correctly. So we would make sense together, and this Christmas I knew what I was going to get her. I knew that I was going to get her. I was going to really do something.

I didn’t know that Christmas was my last chance.