We Never Took the Lights Down [Wreath]
By March the snowbanks have collapsed into exhausted gray piles along the curb,
the kind of sad, crusted scraps that look like they gave up on being magical sometime around mid-January,
but the string lights still cling to the eaves of this crooked little rental,
looped like a half-remembered promise we never quite got around to rewriting,
plastic clips hanging on for dear life through thaw and freeze and another round of freezing rain that nobody ordered.
They were supposed to come down “next weekend,”then “after New Year’s,”then “when it warms up a bit,”then “once everything calms down at work,”and you can pretty much chart the slow failure of all those plans by the pile of laundry on the chairand the stack of unopened mail leaning against the fruit bowl like a paper avalanche waiting for gravity to get bored.
The group chat started out December with plans written in caps and exclamation points,
matching pajamas, board games, themed drinks, ugly sweaters,
and now by March the same chat is mostly rescheduled hangouts,“rain checks,”and half-hearted memes about burnout posted at 2 a.m. when nobody sleeps,
just doom scrolls through everyone else’s highlights like there’s a quiz later.
Inside, the living room still smells faintly of cinnamon-scented candles and burned cookies from some ambitious afternoon in early Advent,
when you tried a new recipe and set off the smoke alarm,
and we laughed so hard we had to open every window while December air punched us in the teeth,
but somehow nobody minded because, for one stupid second,
it felt like we were nailing this whole human thing,
like the year hadn’t already chewed us up and spat us against the wall.
Now the cinnamon is mostly dust in a jar,
the candles are little stumps with blackened wicks,
the cookie sheets are stacked in the sink under three days of plates,
and those same string lights keep throwing soft, defiant color across the ceiling every evening,
like they missed the memo about the party being over and are just stubbornly prepared to go into overtime.
Neighbors walked their dogs past in January and joked about how we’re “really getting the most out of Christmas,”in February someone said, “Hey, they’re basically Valentine’s lights now,”by March even the jokes ran out and the lights just became part of the neighborhood’s background noise,
like the cracked sidewalk or the bent stop sign at the corner,
one more sign that we all live slightly off-script and nobody’s got the energy to fix the props.
When I get home from another too-long day that blurred into the last twelve too-long days,
I stand on the sidewalk for a second and look up at the little colored bulbs glowing against the leftover evening,
one or two burned out, the rest still trying their best,
and for some reason the sight hits harder than it has any right to,
like catching your own reflection in a window when you thought you looked fineand realizing the circles under your eyes are telling the rest of the story you keep skipping.
Inside, the tree’s been gone for months—sent out to the curb and dragged away,
its last needles still lurking in the carpet waiting to stab bare feet like tiny, vindictive ghosts,
the ornaments packed in a box labeled “Holiday” in my shaky Sharpie,
shoved to the back of the closet behind a suitcase and that project I swore I’d start in January when I “had more time.”The only survivors are the lights and a lone snowman mug on the counter,
stained with coffee and milk ring lines like growth charts for caffeine dependency.
We sit on the couch, you and I,
barely speaking, scrolling separate screens,
occasionally showing each other some dumb video to prove we still exist in the same timeline,
and outside the lights throw small phantom reflections on the glass,
floating halos around our faces when we catch our profiles in the window,
like the universe is still trying to cast us as the hopeful leads in a story we keep rewriting into dark comedy.
You say, “We should probably take those down this weekend,” without looking up,
and I say, “Yeah,” in that automatic way that actually means,“I know I’m fried, you’re fried, the world’s on fire, and my arms feel too heavy to hold anything that isn’t a mug,”and we both let the moment pass,
slide off into the comfort of not doing anything about it,
because nothing feels more luxurious right now than permission to fail basic adult maintenance.
But there’s another layer under the laziness,
the one nobody teases because it’s quieter and has sharper corners,
the part where the dark got too loud in January,
where the cold felt like it seeped through the doorframe straight into your bonesand leaving one small, ridiculous string of lights upfelt less like procrastination and more like triage.
There were nights when you sat in that chair by the window,
wrapped in a blanket like a cocoon woven out of thrift store fabrics and unresolved grief,
staring at those lights pulsing in slow, patient patterns,
breathing in time with their cycle because your chest refused to remember how on its own,
and for a few minutes you could pretend that the world outside the glass was paused,
that bills and funerals and silent phones had been put on hold like a song you weren’t ready to stop yet.
There were mornings when I woke up before my alarm,
not out of virtue but out of anxiety,
padded into the kitchen in mismatched socks and watched the lights fade against the dawn,
colors going pale as the sky shifted from ink to ash,
and I felt this stupid ache in my throat like saying goodbye to something that never even knew my name,
like losing a friend whose only job was to glow on command and never ask why.
People say it’s just clutter, just laziness, just not getting your act together,
but they don’t see how much of this year we survived in little, glowing increments,
stringing tiny pockets of brightness along the edge of a season that tried its best to eat us,
how the same strand that looked cheerful in December looked like a lifeline in late February,
casting color on nights when thoughts went too quiet and too loud at the same timeand the only thing that made sense was sitting in their glow until your heart stopped sprinting.
Life moved too fast to keep up with the calendar,
months fell off like cheap pages off a fridge magnet,
resolutions slid into the junk drawer with dead pens and extra screws,
and somewhere between “I’ll start on Monday” and “maybe next month,”these lights accidentally became a shrine to the simple factthat we made it through every day we swore we couldn’t handle.
So maybe we’ll take them down in April,
pretend they’re “spring cleaning” now,
coax them off the eaves and wind them into loops that smell like cold plastic and dust,
tuck them into a tote that still has pine needles in the bottom from three apartments ago.
Maybe we’ll untangle them next November and find one more bulb dead,
one more piece of the past gone quiet,
and we’ll add a new strand, a new row of tiny glass hearts wired for electricity and stubborn hope.
But part of me thinks that even if we eventually clear them away,
I’ll still see those colors when I close my eyes on the worst nights,
like afterimages of the time we quietly refused to let the dark win on schedule,
a memory of how our failure to “get it together”looked a lot like survival from the inside.
So when we finally step outside one warm evening,
ladders wobbling in our half-awake hands,
and start unclipping those faded little stars from the gutters,
I’ll probably laugh at how long we left them,
I’ll mutter something about being ridiculous,
but under my breath I’ll whisper thanks to every bulb that made it this far,
every small, cheap, stubborn light that stayed up with uswhile life sprinted past the calendar and we tried not to fall.