The Nightmare Before Christmas

My last love had a tattoo on his arm of a scene from Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas.  I love Burton's movies, especially Beetlejuice.  Catherine O'Hara and Winona Ryder are just delicious in everything that they do.  I really identified with Winona, even though I was practically, physically, the complete juxtaposition of how they artistically portrayed her character in the movie.  My insides felt like her outside.

I had never seen Nightmare Before Christmas, and the funny thing is, neither had Beau.  I never asked him why he got the tattoo then.  It's a question that I guess I will always be curious about.  Needless to say, after the destruction of yet again another relationship, I began to feel cursed.  Doomed.  I had a sense that the nightmare before Christmas was a grand warning of what was to come.  I literally counted down the days to Christmas.  It was in fact, just one Christmas Eve before that my nightmare truly began.  I relapsed on meth and started shooting it into my veins. I spent Christmas in a motel with my dealer, naked, yearning for another hit,  then another, then another.  I was never really good at moderation.  I want "more, more, more.  how do you like it? more, more, more" like that classic seventies disco song that for some reason I can't remember the name of or who sang it.  Google it.  Or better yet, ask jeeves.  

One afternoon before Halloween, when the weather was still pretty warm in Houston, I went to the local Darque Tan to give my skin the feeling of not being completely sallow and drug infused.  I shut the door and as I hung my jeans on the hook on the back of the door, I saw this skeleton hanging by a small piece of twine, and on his head was a Santa hat.  OMG.  The nightmare before Christmas!  It is going to happen.  I just know it.  

I gripped my steering wheel extra tight over the next two months and counted down the days.  By Christmas I was living in Unit 3 and I felt very alone, yet tribal in a way.  My new apartment was not wired for internet or cable, two things I felt I couldn't live without.  On Christmas Eve,  I left my families home and took the ten minute drive through Memorial Park to get through downtown to my little pad in West Midtown.  Tonight would be the night that I would watch the Tim Burton animatronic picture.  And what happened?

Well I have no attention span, so I watched, but really didn't see the movie.  I painted, made plans, pondered, missed, pined, projected, amplified, jerked-off, and struggled to keep up with the plot.  

I felt like a failure because I can't seem to keep focused on anything except meth, painting, writing, and having sex.  

I woke up Christmas Day and decided that this day would be a day I would give to my family.  Because I can't imagine what they must have endured last Christmas when, after seven months of sobriety, was missing, paranoid beyond belief and spiraling into a madness of chaos.

I spent an hour getting ready and getting just high enough not to frighten anyone, but keep my own personal ghosts at bay.  It was nice.  Everyone had a good day.  I hope they did anyway.  I couldn't buy anyone gifts.  I'm not the uncle who can give my niece and nephew anything expensive.  I just gave them what I hoped was the best I could be on that day.  The day that Christ was born.

What I realized however, just after the new year, was that the nightmare before Christmas was actually someone else's nightmare.

I met this guy one afternoon at the bathhouse.  I was instantaneously attracted to him.  He looked almost identical to Beau.  Like they could be brothers, except for the fact that he had no beard.  He did have a furry chest like Beau's.  I loved burying my face into it.  

This new person told me of how he lost his job, and his apartment two days before Christmas.  I couldn't help but cry.  I felt like an asshole.  I had spent every day wasting my cells and breath on my own selfish fear that I missed having a chuckle, a smile, finding joy.  It was almost like I took on the pain of another.  I couldn't imagine having to endure that, but this new friend seemed to take it all in stride.  It is mind blowing.  I guess it is true.  We all have our own cross to bear and it looks, feels, and weighs so much different for each person, and no one can ever imagine what the other's truly feels like.  Hopefully we don't make judgment calls.  Hopefully we embrace of empathetic  side and try to understand.  One person's nightmare is another person's Valentine's Day card.