A ghost of Christmas past

 I heard this song and it made me think of the first time I spent the holidays with Shawn and his family. It seems like a play by play of how I was shocked and grateful that I could be part of a family like his. Unlike me, his parents were still together and it seems like his entire family was pretty solid. He has some not great extended family, I’ve since learned. It made me see how weird my upbringing was, specifically, with my mom and stepfather. I don’t think my dad was perfect but I give him grace because he never put his hands on me and never went out of his way to terrorize me. So to me, that’s pretty close to perfect. 

—

We’re spending the holidays with our friends in AZ so it’s the first Christmas we don’t spend with Shawn’s parents. It’ll be different but fun because we’ll get to ghost hunt in this spooky town called Jerome and film a bunch of videos, Shawn is already there and I need to fly out alone which I am not very happy about because planes give me panic attacks. I’ve cried on every plane I’ve ever been on and being alone does not help. Also it doesn’t help with everything going on in the world.

I just try not to think about it to hard and that seems to help. I’ve done way harder and scarier things in my life. I can probably sit on a plane and will (probably) survive another take off and landing. Or I won’t and then I’ll just be dead so it won’t matter. I am more worried about not getting home to my cats. 

—- 

The store I used to manage is closing so my old boss and I went to, “dance in its corpse.” Basically went and pointed at all the things we asked corporate to fix and replace and still was not fixed or replaced 10 years later. Surprised it lasted as long as it did. But it went down hill when we both left. Sales dropped, no staff would stay because we left, and stuff just kind of plummeted post covid any how in retail as we all know. Corporate told me “you’re going to regret leaving once you get your other job” after I went on my anti capitalist rant at them in my resignation letter. 

—

Spent the day with my best friend and her younger sister and her sister was telling me about this terrible sounding long distance relationship they found themselves in. My best friend and I were just staring at each other like, “oh sounds like terrible relationships we were in.” But sister had no interest in listening to us. Dating for a month and everyday of that month you’ve fought and the only good quality you can think of is that they seem interested in you does not a solid safe relationship make. But what do I know? I’m only a (finally happily) married woman who has been in a lot of terrible relationships. 

I was kind of bummed out for them because they had a bad experience the beginning of the summer with a long distance friend they started to have feelings for and the friend ghosted them. They were telling me they were going to give up on meeting people. I suggested, maybe not doing long distance because while it is interesting and fun people seem to think it is acceptable to be shitty toward you when you are not within a 40 mile radius of them. That being said, I had a couple not amazing relationships with people closer but I think it’s harder to for people to put on a mask around you if you literally see them all the time. 

Their LDR person specifically does this thing my ex from like 2013/14 used to do to me where he would compliment me and our relationship in one breath and then in the next be like, “oh but you like the color purple and I don’t so we’re not compatible so we should break up.” And if I didn’t immediately respond with (in person or text) something he wanted to hear it would be an all day fight about how I am apathetic and don’t care about him. 

I was actually cleaning out my inbox a couple months ago and found a bunch of long threads from him where we went back and forth on these weekly all night email fights. Literally they started the same way. He would be loving, I would respond in kind, then he would say something varying from weird or heinous and when I responded he would lose his mind and the conversation would lead to me apologizing for usually not being a virgin when we met because he was sooooo mad I wasn’t a good Christian woman and that I had slept with women. (The gay stuff really made him spiral). I was dramatically reading them to Shawn and he was like wtf. He actually said, “I thought you were kind of playing up this for dramatic effect when you originally told me about this. His messages are literally insane.” 

I was like, “yeah everyone thinks I am being dramatic, idk why. I’m autistic with a photographic memory. I don’t make shit up.” 

Our friend Ben said the same thing to me because they were around for that ex nonsense. Ben basically screamed and threatened to call the cops at the ex because he sent legitimately terrifying death threats about me to Ben in a text. Because I was hanging out with my friend Brandon and Rob in a bar and he saw me from across the street and ran at me aggressively and Brandon got between us. Because he thought I was sleeping with Rob, I guess? I wasn’t. Not that it matters because we were broken up for 5 months at that point. He even broke up with me the last time Christmas Day 2014 in a Facebook message that I thumbed up and he got really mad because I didn’t “fight for him.” And I basically said, “why would I fight for you? you want to break up let’s be broken up.” And he proceeded to text me about 500 times from 6pm-7am that night and send me a weird scary letter that my dad was really freaked out by when he read it before he gave it to me. Basically about 3 pages of “if I can’t have you no one else can.” 

(And my dad spent days before reading it telling me to get back together with him. Because, “it can’t be that bad.” He was like, oh yeah, nevermind.)

I probably should have gotten a restraining order, honestly. But I didn’t. He did give me a $100 Starbucks gift card in that letter though so my dad and I did get a bunch of coffees. So that was nice at least. Coffee usually works to get me to do stuff but at that point I was over it. 

Oh well being in that kind of relationship is kind of a canon event, I suppose. You gotta eat a lot of shit until you get to be with someone who makes it all worth it. That’s all I ever wanted was to be with someone who made it all worth it and who would prove to me that love didn’t come with strings.