Such a gloom Christmas time can bring.

Left alone, one's thoughts become a weary rut, as if not quite gone over a million enough times. Like 'the time I became a loser.'

Went back for my first homecoming. I started out in my old VW Rabbit, but the cylinder head was slowly giving way and the best pressure the cylinders could push was about 45 mph and that was probably going downhill. Not a safe speed for the Thruway. I made it from Westmoreland to the Utica exit. Nursed the thing home to my dad's apartment. He let me borrow his car. That night I called her, the girl I'd courted for a bit more than a year. I had graduated, she was a junior now. I called her up. It didn't last long. "Who's this," she demanded. I tried to explain myself, got cut off. "Ha ha," I said, as she dismissed me.

And so I went to the football game the next day. And all the 'no's of the previous year seem to weigh in on my, even in the bright fall sunlight in one of the beautiful happy places of earth. I saw her walk by as I caught up briefly with a guy about what was going on. And then I walked off in the opposite direction, toward the end of the playing field, not looking back. "One more word and I'll go the dean and charge you with..." that kind of a thing. Not a lot of positive. A lot of stilted conversations. And so I walked down to the end of the football field, to think about it, to stew, to not be happy.

Well, my friends were around. I hadn't seen them in a long time. Two of my closest friends wanted a little puff of doobie so I went off with them. And when I came back, there she was, sitting by herself, on the grass, her legs tucked up. I'd been told by a by a kid I knew in her class that her friends, who had never been at all nice to me, say that I had 'been her boyfriend.' And I said to myself, stung as I was, 'yeah, right.' And so I stood there as she sat there.

I guess I was about to go and say something to her just as about as she stood up. I looked down and dragged my toe through the cinder fine grint of the running track in that classic more of shyness. And she walked past me and away.

And so it's me, you know, who screwed it all up in the end, who was an asshole, who was too pessimistic (a Capricorn.) It's me who did the worst possible thing, me who is responsible for not being open, and for worse, for dashing a relationship between possible soul mates in the trash and ruined in an instant whatever might have come out of it, happy times of adventure, a wedding for family members, happy kids, happy grandparents, even as it would have been a struggle. But no, none of that transpired, that nice meet in college kind of a thing that is so appropriate. The rest I'd rather not talk about.

So that is one person's Christmas gloom, a chasm of grief to buy and hold onto, a fine holiday bitterness, no one's fault, but your own, never to be right again, too many years gone by.

Maybe by writing it, there will be some abatement, some counter swing of a pendulum, that gloom will lift, that the day of Christmas will offer some form of peace and hope.