The Ghost of Christmas Past
The tree is still up.
To be fair, it went up several weeks later than it usually does, and it generally never comes down until after the new year. But we’ve now sailed past Epiphany and are hurtling rapidly toward Valentine’s Day, and it remains standing. I’m starting to feel that this might be a problem.
A couple of days ago, I stopped turning its lights on. For weeks I did it automatically when walking into the living room first thing in the morning. I thought maybe if I stopped, the tree would feel less cheery, and therefore I’d be more inclined to box it up for the year. But it only made me more depressed, so today I turned it on again.
I don’t entirely know what the problem is. Part of it is that I’ve been sick. A couple of at-home tests assure me that it isn’t You Know What, but at this point I don’t believe them. I have every symptom that goes with the new variant. Also, it’s been dragging on for weeks. So while it could be Something Else, I don’t think so.
The most annoying effect of whatever has taken up residence inside me is overwhelming exhaustion. Doing anything takes monumental effort. Laundry now feels like the world’s most impossible chore. A book that was due to my editor the first week of the year is barely begun. Thinking about what to have for dinner, let alone foraging for the ingredients and actually making it, is a daily hell.
And then there’s the guilt. In addition to feeling bad about being late with my book, I feel like I’m barely a person. Cubby—who had the same thing I do but has recovered fully—goes off to work every morning and comes home to me having accomplished nothing. It’s got to be like living with a ghost.
Speaking of ghosts, my sister’s has been making unexpected appearances. I thought a lot about her over the holidays, our first without her. Then the other day, while I was slogging my way through washing the dishes that had piled up, Spotify decided to play Charlie Dore’s “Pilot of the Airwaves.” A lot of my strongest memories are connected to music, and suddenly I had a very distinct memory of riding in a car with my sister while that song played on the radio. I would have been about 10, which means Nancy would have been 19. I remember being really happy in that moment. And for some reason, that made me incredibly sad. I couldn’t stop thinking about the things that have been lost, both personally and on a collective level, during a pandemic that has upended the lives of pretty much everyone.
And so the tree. Every morning I think, “Just do it. One ornament at a time. If you’d started this a week ago, you’d be done and it wouldn’t be bothering you so much.” But I can’t seem to do it, just as I haven’t managed to write the words that, had I been doing them every day, would now add up to the book my editor is waiting for.
This morning when I took the dogs out, I ran into our neighbor. “I just love seeing your tree in the window,” she said. “I know it’s way past Christmas, but it’s so cheery.” She sighed. “I couldn’t even bring myself to put one up this year. I was just too tired.”
So maybe it’s not just me. Maybe we’re all too tired.
Or maybe we’re all becoming ghosts. Already, I have a hard time remembering what life was like Before All This. What did we do? Who was I? Earlier this month I was supposed to fly to New York for the annual Mystery Writers of America board meeting. While I was kind of looking forward to it, I was also dreading it. Travel seemed like an activity I could only sort of vaguely remember how to do. Wearing pants. Talking to people. Did I ever really do those things? When it was decided that the meeting would be held virtually instead, I was relieved. I’m too tired to learn how to do new things.
Tomorrow I’ll get up and the tree will still be there. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe it will have started to fade away, it too becoming a ghost. Maybe I won’t have to worry about boxing up all those ornaments at all. Maybe, like so many things this year, they’ll become hazy memories of things I used to do. “Did we have a tree last year?” I’ll ask Cubby. “Or do I just think we did?” ▼
Michael Thomas Ford is a much-published Lambda Literary award-winning author. Visit Michael at michaelthomasford.com