Prompt:

Write about a character who visits their hometown for the holidays and reconnects with a former love interest.

There is a certain cruelty in the kindness of strangers. I feel it when someone holds the door open for me or when someone chases after me to let me know I’ve dropped a $1 bill. I feel it in the way they look at me when I stumble and fall, and rather than breaking around me like an overflowing river around a dam, they stop and ask if I’m okay or if I need help getting up.

There is cruelty in the kindness of my mother, who despite all that has happened, continues to invite me back home for Christmas.

When I left eleven years ago, it was a rash decision I had made without consulting anyone. It didn’t matter to me that I had just landed a decent job at a company I could see myself staying with for years, or even that my father, who was sick from his cancer, might see it as some kind of betrayal. Like I was running away from his condition, rather than the truth of what I had been running away from.

I like to think he knew back then. I like to think he knows now, though he died the year after I had left.

There is cruelty in that, too, I suppose.

I look down at the long since passed ended call from my mother, who sounds more exhausted with each call. I know it isn’t easy for her, like it isn’t for me. I often wonder though, if my inability to handle everything that had happened hounds her thoughts like they do mine.

Surely, I hope not, for my decisions were entirely too selfish. Entirely too much my fault for it to weigh on her conscious.

I look up at the graying sky, thick clouds that bring with it the scent of rain beginning to darken even more, making the afternoon sky look like descending night.

I think of him often. I think of all that we were before I left, and all that we weren’t when I was gone. But mostly, I think of the cruelty in his kindness.

I can still feel the soft, lingering touch of his fingertips as he drags them teasingly along my arms, the way the slight touch made the hairs on my arms stand up in pleasure, the way he gently scratched my forearm and caused shivers to rack through my body at the sensation. We were in our twenties then, him and I.

I take a shaky breath and shake out my arms, as though the feeling is unwanted when, in reality, I would do anything to feel him doing that just once more.

I know he’ll be there, if I were to visit home. I know he never left the small town.

If I went home, to see my mom, to spend the holiday with her, there was the possibility that I would run into Oliver. He could be around a corner, and I would probably end up speechless, like his very appearance knocked all the air from my lungs.

I swallow, looking at the date on my phone.

November 17^th, it’s digital dialog reads back to me, and I know, deep, deep in my very soul that despite it all, I will go. There is still enough time to book my airplane ticket, still enough time to make plans with my job to be gone for the week of Christmas. It’s not like I would be missing much anyway, we’re all off that week.

It’s just the first week in nine years that I would actually be celebrating Christmas, and not just burying myself in work. Mary, my boss, would probably be alarmed and ask if my mother were sick.

It would be easier to tell her yes, that I am going home this year for my mother, and not for the chance of catching the slightest glimpse of Oliver Gray.

It starts to rain when I’ve placed my ticket order online, and I can feel the presence of my father for the first time since he left. As though he knew all the heartache I had longed to escape from eleven years ago.

It feels like his forgiveness.

His kindness is cruel.

It is December 20^th when I board my flight.

As I had predicted, Mary absolutely lost it when I told her I would actually be taking this week off, rather than work through it like normal. She nearly ordered a plane ticket for me to leave the second I informed her, saying my mother must be on her deathbed if I was actually going to go home this year.

I didn’t have it in me to tell her that even when my father was on his deathbed, I could not return. Even we he was laid six feet in the ground, cold and gone, I stayed here.

Looking out the window of the plane, I wonder if my desire to see Oliver will only destroy my heart even more than it has been for the past eleven years.

As all the states pass by, I allow myself the one thing I had denied myself for the past eleven years.

Reminiscing.

It’s a cold, wet day, two weeks before Christmas fifteen years ago.

I was trying to do some late, last minute shopping when I was caught out in the beginning of a slush storm, where the snow was heavy and became muddled the second it touched the ground. I always did that, wait until the two weeks before to Christmas shop.

Mom had wanted a scarlet scarf that I handknit, but I didn’t know how to tell her that I had dropped out of my knitting class because I couldn’t get the patterns right, and the scarf I had tried to make her wound up so loose that it fell apart when I had lifted it up to show Oliver.

He had laughed so hard then, and I was so embarrassed that I had turned the same scarlet of the sad scarf.

I was running around the shops, looking for any scarlet scarves that were knit that I could pass off as my own. I had yet to strike gold.

Dad had said he wanted whatever I wanted to give him. The chemo he was going through then made him tired, and he was positive I would get him something he loved regardless. I wished then, like I did now, that what I could have given him was more time.

What I had gotten him, I had found with a large amount of luck, I had thought back then.

Now, it felt like I had been cruel in my kindness and thoughtfulness then, too.

It was a silver watch with a beautiful blue face, my fathers favorite color. The store I had found it at had even prepared it in a little gift bag, and on a note that they let me write at the shop and drop into the bag, I had written:

“For all the time we have left with each other, let’s beat time together!”

I had thought it clever then and had even teared up when I wrote it. I thought it was the most brilliant thing I had ever come up with.

I was running through the slush, my boots barely keeping out the wet muck, my hand holding my father’s gift inside my coat, afraid that the slush raining down on me would ruin the tissue paper the store associate had stuffed into the small gift bag.

I was running toward the bookstore next, hoping they somehow also sold scarves so I could kill two birds with one stone.

Oliver Gray loved reading; it was the thing we both had bonded over in the early days of our friendship. We had met at the very bookstore I was now only a hundred feet from running into.

As I rounded the corner and finally made it to the door of the bookstore, I rushed inside, bumping into someone, letting out a surprised squeak as the bump set me off kilter, and the slush that was now my boots caused my legs to spring out from under me.

“We should really stop meeting like this.” The voice I had come to recognize and adore spoke.

I felt hands clutch my arms, strong and confident as they held me steady, and set me back on my slippery feet.

Oliver Gray was like that. He was always keeping me steady.

I felt my already wind and slush beaten red face fill with the unmistakable heat of my blush.

“What are you doing here?” I blurted out, panicked at the thought that he would be here when I was trying to Christmas shop for him.

He gave me a knowing smile, the black locks of his hair framing his face, the length just long enough now to bury my hands in.

He bent down and picked up a bag that I could only suspect held books in it and wiggled his eyebrows at me.

“I guess I’m not the only one doing last minute shopping.” He chuckled, and I felt my heart flutter at the sound.

I’m brought back to the announcement of our flight landing, the ground beginning to get closer to my window view, and I blink away the memory, the images of it evaporating like I was clearing smoke.

I can see the trees that surround our small town begin to rise above the view of my window, and I swallow against the pain I suddenly feel at being this close to home. This close to Oliver.

When I depart from the airport, my mom is waiting there, standing outside of it with an unsure smile on her face.

There’s a sudden heartache that breaks through me and I choke back the sobs I feel trying to break free as I forget all my 39 years of age and run for my mom, dropping my luggage bag as I run into her open arms, breaking down like I were a child once more.

Which is silly, I know because I am a child, her child.

She squeezes me, though I can feel her weakened strength, I can sense her old soul as my child one reaches for her.

“I know baby.” She whispers and hugs me so tight that I wonder why I left.

I wonder so hard that I hate myself because I know she cried alone for years, and the one time I cried, she’s there to catch me.

As I sit in the passenger seat of her car, the same one she had eleven years ago when I had left, I can almost feel the weight of my father on my lap. This was his seat. Now it’s nobodies, and I feel like I have disturbed ghosts by sitting in it.

“I missed you.” My mother says softly, and I can hear the quiver in her voice. I avoid looking at her. I have yet to get a hold of myself, and if I saw the pain I knew was there on her face, the guilt would swallow me whole.

“I missed you, too, Mom.”

When we get to the house, the same house I had lived in since I was born, I feel every emotion I had run away from, as though I had left every emotion here and was now experiencing all I had left behind.

My mom helps me bring in my previously dropped luggage, and the smell of the old, comfortable house fills me with so much nostalgia, I feel weighed down by it. There are pictures of dad now, covering the chimney, as though she had enshrined him here.

There are pictures of me, too, enshrined in the only spot my mother has had the both of us for the ten years since my dad passed.

I swallow the lumps forming in my throat, and I look back at my mom.

“I’m sorry.” I croak out, because everything I ever practiced saying on the way back to the only home I had known and run away from eleven years ago started with that.

She smiles, and the wrinkles and age that now show on her face only deepen. She looks like she has aged twenty years, her soul so tired and sad and lonely.

“I’m just glad you’re home again.” She says softly, and then disappears into the kitchen, letting me know that my room is still the way I left it.

I wander upstairs to the room of my childhood, and I settle onto the queen-sized bed. I’m surprised when I find that there is no dust coating everything here. I wonder if my mom cleaned it before I came, but I know that she visited it as often as she visited me when I lived here.

Three days after I came back home, December 23^rd, I leave the house for the first time.

The first day, me and Mom caught up on everything, both of us crying like newborns at all the missed time. The second day, I could barely bear leaving her side for a second. I was now out, running to do last minute Christmas shopping because in my nervous state of preparing to come home, I had forgotten to get my mom something.

As I’m wandering through shops, I find nothing deserving of being gifted to my mother, and I curse myself because if I had just picked up knitting again after all these years, I could have finally given my mom the scarlet knit scarf she had wanted fifteen years ago.

“Delilah?” A voice I haven’t heard in eleven years calls out, uncertain. The voice is aged, and there’s only a semblance now of the same tone I remember so well.

When I turn, heart pounding, I have to swallow back tears as I see Oliver Gray’s mother looking at me in such surprise, that it would be funny if I wasn’t lost in the absolute sorrow that immediately fills me.

“Mrs. Gray.” I say, my voice barely a squeak.

She blinks at me, as though I were a ghost playing tricks on her.

“Honey, oh my. Your mother has surely missed you, my dear. We all have.” She says, and I see the same weariness in her that I see in my own mother.

I’m standing outside the door of a shop I had passed by in luck, and I thank the stranger that interrupts this cruel meeting when they open the door a crack and ask for my pardon. I step to the side and smile wearily at Mrs. Gray.

“Last minute shopping,” I say in a pathetic excuse,” I’ll see you around!”

Like the coward I am, I run away from her, too. Even when she calls out to me again.

I left the shop an hour later, though I had purchased my mom’s gift within twenty minutes of being in the line.

It’s a beautiful baby blue knit cardigan, so long that it would come down to around the back of my mothers’ knees. There are small red and white flowers knit into the sleeves of it.

Scarlet for my mother, and blue for my father. It would go well with the scarlet scarf I had found the day I had entered the bookstore to find Oliver there. I had always joked that meeting him there was the luck that allowed me to find that scarf. Even if my mother knew I wasn’t the one who knit it.

As I walk out and down the street, heading back towards Mom’s house, I feel a presence that I have known my entire life. I look up, into the beautiful speckled dark brown eyes of Oliver Gray, and though it is fifteen years past my last sighting of him, he looks the same.

I wonder if his mother let him know I was here.

Tears immediately fill my eyes, and I move around him, avoiding being near him as I try to rush past.

“Delilah.” His soft voice says, coaxing me to turn around. I don’t, I keep walking. I walk until we’re alone, in the last place I had spoken to him.

I knew, when I came, that I would end up here again.

He’s followed me all the way here, and I can feel his presence even more now as it weighs down on me, all the past and present catching up with me now.

He moves past me, and I watch him settle onto the cold, frosty grass. He smiles at me tightly and pats the ground beside him. I move without thought, sitting beside him cross legged, as though I were a child once more.

This town seems to do that to me. It makes me the child I once was.

“I missed you.” He says, and I break down into the tears that have rimmed my eyes since I first saw him.

“Don’t say that. Don’t you dare start with that. You were the one that left first.” I accuse, angrily. “I avoided this place because I knew you would come back and I couldn’t stand the thought of running into you.”

He smiles sadly at me, and his hand moves to lightly rub over the thick jacket I have on, as though he was lost in the memory of how he used to run his fingers gently over my arm.

“My sweet Delilah.” He begins, and I feel the suffocating lump settle in my throat.

“When we first met, I was four and you were two. Our parents would joke about how you had thrown your stuffed dog at me when I had bumped into you while I was running around that bookstore you ran into me at fifteen years ago every time they saw us together.”

I don’t want to hear this story. I’ve heard it hundreds of times, I remember every detail of it.

“Since then, we were thick as thieves, and we remained friends well into our twenties.” He reminisces, moving so his legs stretched out and he was leaning back on his arms, staring up at the dark Christmas sky, dark with the promise of snow, not slush.

He looks at me suddenly, tears in his eyes as he smiles a smile so profoundly sad, that I feel as though it were ripping my heart from the cavern it was being held hostage in.

“I never got to tell you, Delilah, but I have loved you since that stuffed dog incident. I had loved you and always kept it a secret that everyone but you and me knew.”

I feel my body begin to shake uncontrollably with the sobs of my broken heart.

“Eleven years ago, you left.” he says, and I look away. “And you blamed yourself for everything that happened. You were so cruel to yourself, but everyone around you understood, as I did. You left me and this town behind to forget the heartache.”

As I look back at him, Oliver Gray is gone, and in his place is the cold, dark gray stone of his headstone, staring back at me.

“Oliver Gray, Loving Son and Friend to All, Whose Love Began in this Town and is Carried in Those Blessed Enough to Witness It” the carved, beautiful writing states.

Below the script, the date of his death, eleven years ago, haunts me.

I had called him that night, the 23^rd of December eleven years ago. I had begged him to come over because I had something to tell him that I could no longer wait. He had promised to meet me in ten minutes; his house was a fifteen-minute drive from my parents.

The slush of snow that night had formed black ice on the road, and in the first seven minutes of his speeding, he had met with a particularly cruel piece of slick road, and the tires of his old, beat-up car weren’t able to get the traction they needed to maintain their grip on the road.

When he lost control, his car had flipped three times, and for the eleven years after that, I had blamed myself for it.

“I was coming to tell you, before you could tell me, how I felt.” The note attached to the destroyed bouquet of snowdrop flowers said.

“I miss you, Oliver Gray.” I sob, touching his cold stone ever so lightly. “I miss you so much, that this town has haunted me. I miss you so much, that I wish I had never worked up the nerve to tell you how I had loved you since our meeting as well.”

When I am just outside my mother’s house, I see her sitting in the two-seater swing on the porch, a blanket on her lap and two mugs of hot chocolate in her hands.

“She called you, didn’t she?” I ask numbly.

She smiles sadly and nods, motioning for me to join her.

When I do, numb and with eyes so puffy and red that I must look like I were having an allergic reaction, she leans into me.

“She called me crying, telling me that she could see the hatred you carry for herself. Both Mr. and Mrs. Gray wanted me to tell you that they do not blame you, and they would love if you visited them for Christmas.” She tells me, and though I have done nothing but cry since my arrival, the eleven years of built-up tears that I didn’t allow myself to shed pour out of me, and my mother moves to hold me.

My mother cries with me.

It’s December 25^th, Christmas. I had spent the next day after my day out locked up in my mother’s house, heartbroken all over again, with my heartbroken mother, who must have felt ten times what I was.

Her and my father were together for 37 years when my dad died, and her heartbreak didn’t make her run away like mine did. She stayed strong for the both of us, even when I was away.

The heartache of losing Oliver Gray had rendered me so emotionally broken, that though it had been eleven years, and I was now 39 years old, I had never once been able to look at anyone else romantically.

When my mother opened my present, tears leapt into her eyes, and she inhaled shakily.

“Oh, my sweet girl.” She breathed, hugging the cardigan close.

I wander up the steps to a porch I was once as familiar with as my own. The screen door has a sign that reads:

“The Grays, though we’re a bit more colorful than most Grays.”

Before I can even knock, Mrs. Gray swings the door open to greet me, her smaller, more fragile frame holding onto me as though she were afraid I would disappear again.

Mr. Gray follows close behind, his hair as gray as his last name. He’s an older version of Oliver, with older eyes that his sons were once the younger version to. I break down all over again, and they usher me inside before they both hold onto me for dear life.

After an hour of crying, and the Gray’s telling me how much they missed me and never once blamed me, we all sit together and they hand me a present wrapped with paper so old and fragile, it looks as though it may rip at the smallest indiscretion.

It’s a small, cube shaped box, and I can feel my heart in my throat as I shakily rip the paper, the Gray’s watching me with tears dripping from their faces.

The cruelty of the ring inside the box is enough for my heart to squeeze as though it were finally giving up on itself.

When I return home, the ring on my finger, my mom is waiting up for me with a present, wrapped in another small cube shaped box. I am exhausted, and though I have cried my heart out today, the sight tugs at my heart and I feel my tears welling again.

“Please tell me that’s not another ring.” I choke out, trying to make light of everything that has happened in this one week.

My mom smiles, surprising me with a laugh.

“No, just come open it.” She holds it out to me and I take it gently.

I hold my breath as I open it and I begin to cry once more.

Through tears, my mom says, “He always knew you would come back. He would say his one regret was that he wouldn’t be around when you did.”

The watch I had given my dad was in the same box I had given him for Christmas fifteen years ago. He left a note inside, and the sight of his handwriting has me pressing a hand to mouth as I try to hold back my shaking sobs.

“To my Daughter, who will have to learn to forgive herself where no one but her blamed herself. I’m giving you back the time you wished to have with me, so that you may have it to yourself, in which you will heal. Your mother is strong, but I hope that when you return, you will stay by her side. I wish I could, but I have known for some time that my days are coming to a close. I promise, my sweet Delilah, that I will let Oliver Gray know when I get to where I am going, that you have continued to love him, and that one day, you’ll find your way home again. I love you, we all do. We always will.”

A year after, it is Christmas again. I returned to my home away from home for two months before I ended up moving back home with my mom, who was all too happy to open her home up to her child again.

My heart still aches for Oliver Gray, and for my father, whose presence I can feel within this house, but is truly gone. While I healed from my heartache, I found that my mom was also still healing from hers. We were similar in that we both lost the one we had loved for years.

My mother, who had been married to my father for 37 years, and me, who had harbored love that I foolishly hid from Oliver for 26 years, a love now going on 38 years strong. The ring he had planned on giving me for Christmas twelve years ago now, still on my ring finger, where I never removed it, as my mother never removed the ring my father had given her.

The doorbell rings as I am setting up the table for four people, and I go to open it, smiling brightly at the Grays.

“Merry Christmas.” I say to them, they both say it back to me as they hug me.

When we are all sitting at the table, chattering and enjoying each other’s company for Christmas, I let my mind wander to the Oliver Gray who would’ve been 42 this year, where I was now 40.

I let myself wonder how many grandchildren we would have given our parents, and I smile sadly at the thought.

I wonder if my heartbreak was enough that it hurt my fathers soul so much that he couldn’t continue on, and what might’ve been more time if none of it had ever happened.

As I look at faces that I used to believe would hate and despise and curse me for all that had happened, I see nothing but love, without the cruelty of the kindness love affords me.

I look outside, to the first signs of the snow that would stay for another three months nonstop, and I smile, imagining Oliver Gray watching me with my father from outside the window.

I’m home, Oliver Gray.

Credits:

Christmas Decorations : Sugaree-33

Christmas Stamp : Hikari-Miko on DA