Evergreen Rot
December drags its teeth across the gutters and shingles, freezing every mistake you made this year in the cracks of your windows,
The heater rattles its death rattle, blowing stale, burnt air that never touches your skin,
You stand at the window, breath fogging the glass, and trace a middle finger through frost that clings like old guilt,
Outside, red and green lights flicker, but they’re just sickly stains in the fog,
And the neighbor’s Santa is slumped against the porch like a drunk, half his smile ground into the muddy yard,
Somewhere on the next street, a car backfires,
Somebody yells fuck you at the sky,
Their voice slicing through the carols leaking unchanging from the discount radio,
It’s Christmas in a house that smells like old coffee, cheap whiskey, and the ghosts of every person who swore they’d come back.
The tree leans in the corner, fake pine needles dusting the carpet,
Decorated in broken memories—tiny picture frames with faces scratched out or turned to the wall,
A reindeer missing a leg, an angel with singed wings,
You wrap gifts for people who stopped speaking to you,
Write To: No One on tags, just to feel the sting of writing anything at all,
Last year’s promises still stuck to the baseboard,
Sticky tape and dried blood from a cut that never healed,
And you find yourself humming along to “Silent Night”
While biting your tongue so you don’t spit out every ugly thing you want to say.
Kids outside whip dirty snowballs at each other’s faces,
Their laughter jagged, high,
The kind that always means someone is about to cry,
You light another cigarette with shaking hands and blow smoke toward the blinking lights,
Remember every December you tried to believe in something warm,
Before your mother stopped singing,
Before your father started drinking the daylight away,
Before you learned that the only thing waiting for you under the tree was silence,
And the cold that crawled into your chest and made itself a home.
You eat dry turkey at your aunt’s,
Each chew a countdown to another awkward silence,
Fork scraping across your tongue,
A string of bullshit well-wishes stuck in your throat,
Unwrap a bar of soap and socks you’ll never wear,
A card that says “Hope you’re well,”
But there’s no one left in that house who ever hoped for anything,
You drink until your vision runs,
Until the tree blurs into a dead thing wrapped in lights,
And you fall asleep on the couch,
Tangled in scratchy blankets,
Dreaming of snow piling up outside the door,
Dreaming of pine needles stabbing your lungs until you forget how to breathe.
Christmas isn’t hope—
It’s muscle memory,
It’s the sound of footsteps that never reach your door,
It’s the memory of voices calling your name from another room,
It’s the weight of absence under blinking lights,
It’s love left to rot in the corner—
Evergreen,
Unforgiven,
Still pretending to live.