Smile On His Lips and Cuts On His Hips (Jalex)

Twenty Three - One Moment

Christmas was, in the most depressingly unsurprising manner, a disappointment. It wasn’t that anything went wrong, per say; I got all the music and clothing I wanted, we covered every surface in the kitchen with flour and frosting while making gingerbread cookies, snow blanketed everything visible through the frosted windows, and I watched Home Alone and the original Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer while curled up on the couch in my pajamas and furry slippers, sipping cinnamon hot chocolate, singing along unashamedly to every holiday musical number.

It was fun and great and everything, but it never lived up to the expectations that my childhood memories had instilled in my mind. I always woke up on Christmas morning expecting the world to be shown in brighter colors with sharp edges with a magical spirit saturating the air. The December holiday from my younger years was portrayed in my mind as this absolutely dreamlike day during which everything was mystical and Santa’s previous presence in my home was tangible. And while the cookies May and I had set out the night before, following tradition, were absent, the milk glass beside them half empty, I stopped believing long ago and the reality was that Christmas was just another normal day.

Growing up sucks.

The day before Christmas had almost been more special, in fact. Rian and Zack complied to their cliché couple holiday image and went ice skating, inviting me to tag along with the disgusting love fest. Not wanting to be a third wheel, I invited Alex, who, in turn, brought Flyzik and Grieco, two jocks who Zack happened to know from football. (It had been explained to me when I asked that Grieco was referred to as Grieco because having two Alex’s in one group was too confusing, and Flyzik went by his last name for some mysterious reason that was only communicated by mischievous looks when I inquired about it.) I never would have expected myself to spend Christmas Eve ice skating with three football players, my boyfriend, and a nerd, but it was one of the only things that had ended up happening that year that I was not eager to complain about.

While Alex being bundled up in gloves and a scarf would have surely been adorable, he stayed true to what I had come to expect from the boy, skipping through the snow and scooting into my heated car with his cheeks flushed pink from the cold when I picked him up, wearing only a denim jacket and hoodie to combat the icy weather. I asked him about that during the drive, and he responded that he liked being cold. Alex told me that it made him feel something and reminded him that he was a person who was alive, and I began to eagerly await the day that he would bundle up like a normal person because he didn’t feel the need to put himself through uncomfortable and painful things in order to not be numb.

In total, I had three mugs of hot chocolate, approximately a hundred marshmallows, fell on my ass six times, pushed Alex against the side of the rink and kissed him quiet when he mockingly offered to kiss it better after half of those slips, ate five pieces of pepperoni pizza from the restaurant we went to afterwards, and two rainbow sprinkled, chocolate glazed donuts.  Immediately after leaving the diner and four other boys that we’d spent the night with, I developed a sudden desire to craving for donuts, and Alex happily declared that it was worth the fifteen minute drive to the nearest Krispy Kreme when I expressed that to him. I wondered if the feeling I got when Alex kissed the rainbow sprinkles off my lips with a lemon cream mouth was what those authors were always trying to describe in romance novels.

___

Winter break had been going ok, so far. If I discounted that one night when I had been trying to play a riff and screwing up endlessly, getting frustrated and almost chucking my guitar at the wall, eventually contemplating why I ever bothered doing anything since it inevitably ended in failure and spending the rest of the evening in the company of sharpened metal and myself deprecating thoughts, nothing bad had happened. I had stopped judging days on how good they were somewhere during the first month of Junior year, and instead placed them on a scale of badness, since I could no longer remember the last twenty four hours during which there wasn’t at least ten minutes during which I was pretty sure that I fit the dictionary definition of depressed. If I was driving home from school and thought that the day I’d halfway completed ‘could have been worse’, then, in comparison to the rest of my recent life, it was a pretty fucking good couple of hours. Which was actually quite sad, but, well, so was most of my current existence.