What would I do? How would I spend it?
I’d fly back to New York and ask my family for something simple: let’s celebrate Christmas together. Let’s play Nightmare, make things by hand, crowd around the table, laugh too loudly, tell the same old stories, and forget the rest of the world for a little while.
I’d want one of those Christmases that feels almost suspended in time. The kind you remember years later in little flashes. The sound of everyone laughing in the next room. Someone cheating at a game. Something burning in the kitchen. The cold outside the windows and all of us warm and safe inside.
I wouldn’t care about presents or whether everything was perfect. I’d want time. I’d want memories. I’d want all of us to look around that room and really see one another while we still can, so someday, when the house is quiet and Christmases have changed, we remember each other with love.
And Jim? I’d steal some of that time away just for him.
He is my world. I’d make sure he knew it—not because I told him once, but because I made him feel it in every little thing. I’d hold his hand a little longer. Sit beside him when there was nowhere we needed to be. Tell him the things you think you’ll always have tomorrow to say.
I’d want him to know that through all the strange, beautiful, difficult years of this life, I would still choose him.
Again and again.
Because I love him, and if forever is something we get to make ourselves, I want to spend every bit of mine with him. 💕
