false gift alarm & the curse of hope

On Christmas Eve 2009*, a now-former friend gifted me some homemade biscotti. It was such a touching, loving gesture.  I just teared up a bit as I remembered how I felt when he called to announce he would like to drop off a gift. And now I am crying because he now shuns me.  Once I love someone, it's forever -- relationships can change but I don't like to lose people I have loved. Sure life circumstances can pull one away from someone they love but this guy has made a willful choice, a deliberate rejection. He never loved me, he said he did but he could not have, for he would not have severed all ties with me if he had ever loved me.

*I remember the year because it was my first year in the home I live in.

Those tiny biscotti were the only Christmas gift I had received from anyone from the year my daughter dumped me, 2002,  up until 2009. Since then, a couple friends have given me a bit of money as Christmas gifts. Maggie used to give me something I wanted, like once I wanted speakers for my iPod. And once I wanted an Amazon Kindle and she gave me one. Great, loving kindness behind those gifts but, I realized after Geo gave me those homemade cookies, that I associate Christmas with surprise gestures of love, which is what a surprise gift is. Oh, I welcome the planned, practical gifts.  I miss being surprised and, although I try not to acknowledge this longing, I realized today that I long to be given another surprise Christmas gift from someone who loves me. What the heck is the point of trying to avoid acknowledging what one feels. I know better. I feel what I feel and denying what I feel clogs my being.

Today, returning home from my writers' group, I found three different notices for packages from Fed Ex. I wasn't expecting anything. While I still believed that the three separate slips, all left on the same day within a few hours, might represent separate packages, I knew they could all be for the same package, I realized I have this longing for a thoughtful, loving Christmas gift with an element of caring surprise. Like that long ago biscotti. 

They were anise biscotti, very tiny and I think he gave me six of those tiny cookies. He gave me so few because I have diabetes and avoid sugar.  Maybe he was merely being stingy but to think that, I would have to be stingy. I prefer to believe what he said, that he knew I didn't eat much sugar so he had only given me a few. Back then, I still ate some sugar, believing I was Type II but now that I know I am Type I, I never buy any food with sugar. I do,  very infrequently, eat something sweet offered to me by a host or hostess. Sometimes the leader of our writers' group puts out chocoalte candy -- just nuts with a few bits of chocolate. I dive for those. I resist her Oreo cookies, like she had out today. I resist the crackers:  sugar-spiking carbs in a highly processed thing like a cracker.  Today, I did not go for the cookies. I ate some nuts and, oh what a treat, a tiny bit of cambazola.  I had not had that kind of cheese in years. I never have been into buying expensive cheese and now I avoid dairy pretty much all the time. But cambazola?  What a treat!

So. My three package slips. One of them had even been put on my apartment door.  As soon as I had the thought "maybe one of these slips is a surprise Christmas gift" I had two intense emotional reactions. I was delighted, happy, feeling some of the mystery that Christmas held for me as a child as I awaited Santa's gifts.  I was, oh so fleetingly, excited at the idea that someone had sent me a surprise Xmas gift.  My parents always overindulged their kids with Christmas gifts and I did the same with Rosie. She would have huge piles of gifts and I would have one from her.  My mom always gifted me money, which I usually spent on Rosie.

I have not been loved enough. Buddhists and many new age type thinkers would say I am unloved because I don't love myself. Maybe. I don't think that is why I am unloved. I think I am unloved because this time I am paying back some bitching past karma. I believe this incarnation has a destiny of unhappiness in this life. Woe is me, eh?

So I called Fed Ex, read off the three tickets. All three were for the same package. And the package was a delivery I had forgotten, some bandages I use to keep a medication patch on my skin. In my swimming, the medication patch tends to fall off and the company that makes this drug offers these free patches that keep them on. Bandages.

No Christmas present for me.  I guess I am not a good girl. Unloved except by the Cosmic All.

In recent years, friends check in to see that I have something to do on Christmas but no one has asked me if I have Christmas plans or invited me to join them, not since Rosie left me. It is as if the whole human community has decided to reject me along with Rosie.  I am used to being alone on all holidays but hope, that thing with feathers, floats and drifts. Holidays usually shut out the Elijahs of this world. I hear, all the time, about chosen families, people who form bonds and celebrate holidays with their friends as a chosen family.  I have never found that kind of community and I have no family. So no Christmas for me this year, although, hope being the eternal curse that it is, as I write 'no Christmas for me this year' I notice whispers in  my being floating like feathers. Hope afloat!

Last year, a friend invited me to go to the free-on-Christmas Jewish museum. Then she tread me to lunch at the deli in the museum. I quite enjoyed that tiny, overpriced chopped liver on rye.

Nah. The only Christmas I'm gonna get this year is the few minutes in which I held out a belief that maybe someone had sent me a surprise.  I enjoyed that fleeting excitement. I must say. Maybe I can let that be enough, let that floating feather suffice. Love what comes?

I am ashamed to write this but I will:  one flickering thought, very fleeting, that left so fast I almost didn't notice I thought it, was "maybe Rosie send me a Christmas gift". Fantasy. Grief.

No cookies, no shared meal and no surprise gifts.