Christmas

3–5 minutes

A Doorway Half Open

Christmas arrived suddenly.

Before I knew it, one of my favorite holidays was here.
Arriving soft, quiet, and very much present.. yet with hindsight, it poked at me days before its official arrival…Gnawing on those soft places.

Each place, held a heartbeat of love. Deceased parents, long distant kids, a move on the horizon from a beloved community, and him. Each heartbeat, a reflection of all that love holds, memory, beauty, laughter, conversations, loss, sadness, and misaligned challenges… asked me to see.

This year, the heartbeat of Christmas came with a particular weight, the kind of weight that settles in the chest when the house is quiet and the rituals are self-made. Alone, but not unfamiliar or a particularly bothersome aloneness. Still, something about this Christmas felt different…less choice, more revelation, a December light. A light that arrived after the Christmas music quieted, after the night exhaled and I sat in stillness.

My body was tired in specific ways. Not the tiredness of a long day, but the fatigue that comes from treatment, from heavy, accumulating medications doing what they do, from a nervous system already carrying more than it would prefer. My mind wandered. Focus came and went. Meditation was possible only in fragments, breath by breath, moment by moment…. an act of humility.

And then there was my mother’s voice.
Clear. Unmistakable.
Not urgent, not scolding, just firm enough to interrupt the spiral.

“Get up Oradora”. A gentle knocking on my forehead, a lifting of each eyelid revealing her smiling face, a gentle pull on my toes…just as she did when I was a little girl. “Get up kiddo, it’s Christmas”

Not because joy was waiting.
Not because the day would magically improve.
But because getting up was an act of self-respect. Because if I stayed down too long the tenderness would turn to collapse and become dangerous. In reflection… getting up was a Christmas gift..

So I did.

I got up.

I did a short yoga practice, lit my candles in gratitude.
I fed myself. Heart, soul and belly.
I reached out and spoke with friends and family.
I prepared something traditional, warm and simple. Yummy.
I honored the day without pretending it was something else.

There was champagne untouched. A specific choice not to numb.
There was quiet, a reverence, even.
A certain sadness, and loneliness were allowed to sit at the table without being handed the microphone…LOL, definitely, no microphones allowed in the headspace today.

And threaded through all of this, soft, complicated, unfinished… was a person of my heart.

When I imagine California, he appears in the picture as everything at once. A no, a weight, a witness, a maybe, a yes, a possibility, a question mark. All pictures, possibilities, and energies too were allowed at the table.

The breakup is real. Necessary. Not a mistake.
And still very much tender.

Over the years, and experiences, I’ve realized that love does not always disappear just because clarity arrives. Sometimes, actually more often than not, it lingers at the edges, like a fresh scar. Healing, yes, but sensitive to touch, to memory, to sudden jolts. I don’t want to rip it open. yet, weirdly, I don’t want to harden around it either.

There was care. There was steadiness. There was hope. There was respect and love. There was also misalignment, miscommunication, and unclarity that no amount of love could resolve.

These many truths coexist, even when my heart wishes they wouldn’t.

California feels like a forward motion. Like air. Like a calling, a possibility.
It doesn’t erase what came before. It simply refuses to carry what no longer aligns.

And so this Christmas, quiet, heavy, imperfect, became something else entirely… a doorway of sorts. A doorway that stood half opened. Not a celebration, not a failure. Just a moment, a day of standing still long enough to feel what’s real.

The inner snow storm, heavy, quiet and even beautiful in its weight, did not need fixing.
It simply needed care and a special kind of witnessing.

When the day ended, I noticed something subtle but important. I was still standing. Softer ever more, Worn in places. But intact. A woman learning again…and again that she can hold the space of sadness, loneliness and silence without being swallowed by it.

Tomorrow would come….and it did 🙂

~Leora Ann Ellis