Name: Nikki
Favorite Christmas Movie: How the Grinch Stole Christmas (animated)

I Found Hope

Starring: Zac
Rating: PG

The snowstorm outside was raging war with nature, I was sure I could hear the muffled sound of trees cracking under the weight of the immense amount of snow that had been thrust onto their branches. It seemed sort of odd that I could relate to inanimate objects. But the way the snow seemed to continue falling, landing on the branches and making the trees heavy and chained, it all seemed to echo familiarly through my mind.

What kind of analogy was this? I couldn't believe I was sitting in my bedroom thinking of this stuff, but there really wasn't much else to do. The snow outside was giving off an air of intense solace, it seemed like a time to think. Perhaps not about trees and their analogy to my life, but a time to think about other things.

For example, a time to reflect on my life and how much had changed in the last five years. And there had been a lot of change in my life. I was nothing like the person that I was when I had been that tree, and yet, I was. I always would be. My past made that weighed down and immobile tree seem like the core of myself, always.

They say that time heals all wounds. I disagree. Some wounds are made to last forever. The scars of them at least. They need to be there to remind us of our past, the paths we take, the mistakes we make, the choices we spend the rest of our lives regretting. Those scars do heal over, but they always are on the surface, ready to split open, ready to shoot stabbing pains through us, to remind us of why those lessons were learned the hard way. To caution us from making the same mistake twice.

For me, that tree symbolized a girl who had been making the wrong choices her entire life. That tree symbolized a weighed down girl, ready to give up and walk away and not care about the consequences. I had so much thrown at me at once that even thinking about how I managed to find my way through that and be someone that I could be proud of still escaped my comprehension. Like the snow falling on the branches, I'd had so much proverbial weight to carry, I hadn't ever realized that winter would end. I was happy. Finally. Kind of.

Moving in with my father, whom I had never met before I was nearly an adult myself, was the best thing that had ever happened to me. Though, it still took me years to be able to see that. The scars still throbbed painfully when I thought about sitting in that truck with him, moving out of state with a complete stranger. All of my belongings were in the bed of his truck in silent protest as my life was turned upside down.

"Kylie?" I was shaken from my thoughts, thinking about how different my view of this once-stranger had become. He was no longer a stranger, no longer a villain. He was my father.

"Yeah," I answered instead of asking, turning my head to listen as he called up the stairs, announcing the reason for the interruption for my so-called meditation.

"Come down in about fifteen minutes, okay? Maria's making hot chocolate for everyone as soon as I get some more wood in the fireplace."

I nodded, still lost in the whirlwind of my thoughts. "Alright."

When I heard him shut the door to my loft bedroom, my gaze followed across the room, landing on my treasured guitar. It was my most prized possession. It rose above the car my dad had given me, which was now sitting in the garage, not very good at handling snow. It rose above the easel, sitting in the corner that Dell had given to me, just before she died. It rose above the hand carved, rosewood jewelry box that Zac had given me for my birthday the year before, personalized with a beautiful inscription of my name. My guitar had my heart in it, because my music had my heart in it. I had poured every ounce of everything that I had felt through my entire life into that hollow Mahogany belly and used those six strings to rewrite my history.

I picked up the tattered composition notebook I had been using to jot down some lyrics and stuck my pen inside the worn, flipped through pages, setting it back in its place, inside the drawer of my bedside table. Using composition notebooks seemed to bring me closer to my mother. We both used them for journals, just in different mediums. Her journaling was done through words, written like a story of her life. Mine was through words, written like the soundtrack of my life. Her picture sat in a silver frame beside my bed, a constant reminder of love and sacrifice and what it meant to really be alive. Dell was there too, her smile still making that scar ache with her absence.

My feet hit the solid wood floor of my bedroom, the shock of cold creeping into my toes as I made my way across the expanse of my slowly darkening bedroom. It was still early, but the days were so much shorter now. I slid my feet into the warmth of my favorite Goofy slippers, the face of the Disney animated dog looking up at me from my thawing feet, his tongue dangling precariously over the side.

I took one last long look at my bedroom, leaving the meditation and the thoughts for my return, and made my way down the stairs, first to the second floor of the house, then down into the living room. I first saw Maria, as helpful as ever, setting a tray filled with mugs of steaming hot chocolate down onto the coffee table. Then my dad, still poking the blazing fire in the fireplace. Then, over by the tree, as my heart skipped a beat, was the person who I believed had given me the strength to change my life and helped me have the courage to become the person I had never dared imagine I could be.

"Zac," I spoke in my still quiet voice. As much as my life had changed, those scars still kept my voice soft spoken, still on the outskirts of drawing attention to myself.

"Kylie," he spoke back, almost teasingly. A lopsided grin appeared on his face, waiting for a proper welcome. I walked over to him, allowing his arms to surround me, the warmth seeping so deeply into me, it was as if I was warmed completely from the inside out.

"It's never Christmas without your hot chocolate, Maria," Dad complimented as he took a shallow sip from the piping hot mug in his hand. I rolled my eyes at Zac in the inside joke we shared, my dad was so charming that we consistently called him an ass kisser.

Slipping his fingers through mine for a moment, Zac dropped his arms and walked over to the table, never one to leave any kind of sweet treat untouched for long. I followed, grabbing a mug and sinking down into the comfortable softness of the couch as I took a small sip. The liquid burned my tongue slightly, but it was too delicious to care.

I glanced around the living room as my dad busied himself with the uneven stockings on the mantle, trying to align them perfectly. He always went a little crazy around Christmas - there was the tree, which looked like something out of a magazine, then the various lights and red and green and silver decorations all through the house. Even the bathrooms screamed that it was Christmas and demanded celebration.

It was over the top, but, as I'd realized five years earlier, my father never did anything halfway. Everything he did was given his entire attention and effort. It wasn't a fault. It was rather endearing, and something that I didn't just appreciate. I owed him everything for that personality trait. I was sure that I would be lost and probably even dead if it hadn't been for this sometimes overbearing quirk.

"You alright?" Zac whispered to me lowly, nudging me from my silence. I was always a quiet person, but when it came to convenient silences and my deep thought, Zac always knew the difference.

"Yeah," I said quietly back, my body leaning close to his much larger frame. "Just thinking."

He nodded, understanding my thoughts - possibly more than I did, even without speaking. His hand found my knee and squeezed it lovingly as he rested his cheek against my head, his mug balanced carefully in his hand.

Shifting back into the shadows of my mind, the swirling of an epiphany began. This was happiness, and those scars, those wounds that would never quite heal, those memories that could easily be considered my own personal hell, those were what made me happy. As often as I would still cry if I let myself recollect them, live through them again, I still knew that once I settled back into the present, I was still happy. I had found strength and I had found hope, somewhere inside of me, where it had really been the whole time. But finding that hope is what led me to happiness.

And isn't that what Christmas is all about?

Story Index