Running for Home - 38. December 25, 2021

December 25 2021

Ah, Christmas. It was interesting, being one of the faculty with no family to go home to, staying with the students who also had no place to go home to. I said last month that I’ve always hated Thanksgiving because of all the bullshit with my parents and extended family. Christmas wasn’t much different during the latter half of the day, but in the morning… In the morning, when it was our family time, just me and Mom and Dad, it was one of the times I loved my parents the most. It wasn’t just the gifts. It was like all the problems we had dissolved away, if only for a few hours, and we could be the way we maybe should have been if our lives had been different. In some ways, I feel like that yearly glimmer of hope made everything else hurt even more.

Sometimes I wonder what my parents were like before they had me, or at least before I was a few years old and starting to form solid memories. My parents met while my father was on a Colorado ski vacation with friends he grew up with. My mother was the Aussie ski bunny that was working at the front desk of his lodge and hitting the slopes in her free time. Dad flirted with her shamelessly and she took the bait. They hit it off that week and were calling each other just about every day after he went home. When ski season finished she came for a two-week visit before hiking and mountain biking season took off. I guess things were pretty serious, and they talked about getting married. They had an accident with a condom breaking, and a few months later my mother found herself moving across the country to marry my father. My mother had worried about what my father’s reaction would be when she realized she was pregnant, but he was nothing but excited. They were getting married and going to be building a family together. He’d never been happier in his life, he told me. He was even more excited when I was born, his baby boy, his son.

I remember sitting on his lap when I was still really young, going through his photo albums while my dad told me stories about all the people and events found within their pages. I remember seeing the pictures of my dad’s family, my mom’s family. I remember the pictures of their glowing smiles on my parents’ wedding day, of my dad looking so handsome in his tuxedo and my mom so beautiful in that long, flowing white dress. The proud grin on my father’s face, holding me the day I was born. My mother feeding me with a bottle. My chubby little face covered in cake on my first birthday. My father holding my hands over my head as I learned how to walk. A white Christmas with my dad’s family one year, and a warm, sunny Christmas with my mom’s family down in Oz the next. A family photo, me sitting on my dad’s lap with one of his arms around my mother’s shoulders on my grandfather’s living room couch, all of us smiling happily.

My father worked in a parts factory up in Michigan. They made steering wheels for Ford and Chrysler, I think. It was a unionized shop, so he made pretty good money. They decided my mother would be a stay-at-home mom, maybe do a bit of home daycare until I started middle school. I guess things were going according to plan up until the economy tanked when I was five. My father’s factory closed. He tried to find other work, but the situation was dire across the whole Rustbelt, and there just weren’t enough jobs to go around for people like my dad that only finished high school. I guess after a couple years on welfare, my parents all but gave up.

I wonder, now, if they hadn’t drowned their problems in booze and cigarettes whether or not we might have been able to pull ourselves up out of poverty. Whether my dad would have eventually got a new job. Hell, even if they’d just cut out those vices we would have been better off. Even if I hadn’t suffered through the verbal and physical abuse, I probably still would have ended up at Xavier’s when I started middle school. I wonder what things would be like if I hadn’t ran to Tommy’s that Thanksgiving, if I’d survived another two years under their roof. I wonder if, with me out of the house and no longer a financial burden on them, if they could have used that money to recover. I doubt it. They were probably too far gone by that point. I guess I’ll never know.

Christmas morning at the School was happier than I remember it being. Maybe that’s because I’m an adult now and farther removed from the childhood hurts that made it a hard time to deal with living here as a teenager. We had a gift exchange for the students with no family to return to. Each student received three gifts from Santa, and then any others their friends may have given them as well. Many of the faculty bought gifts for one another. I’d handed most of mine out over the last few days since almost all of my closer friends were heading out of town. They had explicit instructions not to open the gifts I gave them until today, though. I didn’t really want to see the looks on their faces when they opened them, not if they were disappointed. I had a lot of trouble shopping for people, to be honest, but I wasn’t just going to buy everyone various gift cards. That’s the epitome of lame. I got some nice chocolates for everyone else on staff because pretty much everyone likes getting chocolate, even if they bitch and moan about how bad it is for them when they open it up.

Most of the gifts I received were decently cool. Dani and Sam bought me a pair of tickets to see a west coast ska band I like when they go on tour in March. Jubes, Jean-Paul and Piotr gave me an awesome stereo system for my room and a sweet set of headphones, since I’d been bitching about the piss poor sound quality coming from my laptop. I’m glad they split the cost of that gift between the three of them, because it must have been pretty expensive. Rachel gave me a bottle of my favorite bourbon and Xi’an, unsurprisingly, gave me a few books: a complete collection of poetry by Walt Whitman, Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, and John Greene’s latest book. Even Emma got me something, a gorgeous fountain pen set that glides over the page like silk when you write.

And then there was Bobby’s gift. It was a small box, and horribly wrapped. I had the urge to shake it, but I contained myself and slowly removed the cheap reindeer-infested wrapping paper. There was a folded note and underneath it, nestled in an excess of tissue paper, was a pair of lighters. The first was a matte black Zippo with a stylized red dragon made of flames. The second was gorgeous, carved-pewter blue-flame torch lighter depicting Prometheus, the fire-bringer, chained to the rocks. I opened the note carefully, looking at Bobby’s scrawl.

Johnny,

The last few months have been a time of many changes in my life. I know we got off to a bad start, but I’m glad that we seem to have been able to move beyond it now. You probably remember that Christmas is my favorite holiday. You seem to remember a lot about me, all these little details. I feel like I should be surprised but I’m not, not when it comes to you. Christmas has become rather bittersweet for me over the years. Part of me wishes I was sticking around the School for the holiday, but I can’t leave my parents alone on Christmas. It took a long time for them to accept me back into their lives. As difficult as they can be sometimes they are my family. My brother committed suicide eight years ago, so I’m all they have left. It still weighs on them heavily. Me too, if I’m being honest... Even though he completely fucked us over after we ran to my parents house in the wake of Stryker’s attack, and even if he grew up to be even more of an arrogant, regressive prick than my father, he was still my brother and I loved him. Something happened to him, I’m not sure what. He got involved in some odd Christian religious group through a girl he met in college but didn’t want to talk much about it with my parents. He eventually got married to some other woman he met in church and they were expecting a baby, but a few months after they announced it my parents found out she had suddenly left him. Ronnie took his life not long after that. She didn’t show up to the funeral. Even her parents came to Ronnie’s funeral, but they had no idea where she was. She had just disappeared. We never found out what happened to her or the baby. I know you must have some strong and probably negative feelings about Ronnie, since he was the one who betrayed us to the police before Alkali Lake, but I’d like us to talk about him some day. I don’t really know why. Maybe because I feel like you’ll draw things out of me that I have trouble saying, have trouble dealing with. It will be a hard conversation for me, but at the same time I’d like it if you’d listen.

I guess that’s a bit of a pointless digression. I hope this is an okay gift. The black lighter is one that I bought for you a long time ago. It was supposed to be your Christmas gift that last year you were still here in school, but you left with Magneto that November. I’m not sure why I held onto it all this time, but when I was wracking my brain trying to think of something not-lame to give you I remembered that I still had it buried in a box underneath a bunch of mementos and other things from our high school years. I decided I might as well give you another one along with it, but a much nicer one than teenage me could have afforded. You can debate whether or not Prometheus is a fitting mythological figure for you. I’ve come to accept the fact that despite the mistakes you’ve made in the past, you’ve always fought for causes you believed in, causes you thought would make the world a better place. Whether it’s been with the pen or the sword, you’ve always been a champion. I wanted to say fighter, but for some reason that doesn’t sit quite right. You aren’t a fighter, are you John? Not in the sense of that old saying, anyway. You’d probably argue with me endlessly about this, but I think your passion and furor comes from something else. No, you aren’t the one who fights because that’s who they are. I think you are a lover and a survivor, one who can show a better way because you know better than anyone just how bad things can get. You fight to survive. You fight when you have to do it, you fight because life beat fighting into you so hard. Maybe I’m reading into things too much. Maybe I’m just seeing things the way I want to, one of my eternal weaknesses. I’ll let you be the judge of whether I’m right.

I am glad we are friends again. I want to be able to be there for you again, to be a shoulder you can lean on amidst all your hurts. I hope that you can believe that. From the small glimpses into your world that I’ve had over the past few months, it’s clear you carry a lot of burdens. You can unload on me, John, whenever you need. I know that’s probably a difficult thing because you’ve always been the one who thinks he needs to stand on your own two feet and be independent and strong, but we all need one another sometimes. Your strength in the face of everything you’ve suffered amazes me, but I want you to know that you don’t have to face that by yourself. I hope that this year, soon, you will find yourself no longer alone, chained to those rocks on the top of a mountain in agony, and you can move forward into the bright future you deserve.

Merry Christmas,

Bobby

My hand had began to shake a bit as I read through it. I swallowed hard, trying to keep my emotions in check. That bastard. That fucking bastard. Why did he have to do this to me? Why did he have to write something like this?

I didn’t want to cry in front of everyone. I had to clamp down on my emotions, hard. Daniel noticed, though, and came over from where he was showing off to some of his friends the smartphone I’d given him - new friends, and hopefully the kind of friends who would have his back this time around. Look, I know giving a teenager a cell phone that he doesn’t need was probably a stupid idea, but I trust Daniel. We’d have a talk about what was and wasn’t acceptable use. It wasn’t what I’d originally intended to give him, actually. I decided weeks ago I was going to teach him how to drive when he turned sixteen in a couple months, but it would be lame to ‘give’ that to him now and not on his birthday. So I decided I needed to think up some other ideas. I couldn’t get the car theme out of my head, for whatever reason. I kept coming back to it even after I thought I had some other good ideas. Then it hit me - a cell phone would kill two birds with one stone. Once he passes his test and can be out driving on his own I want to be sure he had something to get in touch with us in case something happens to him on the road. So I discarded my other gift ideas and got him the phone instead. It`s only a pay-as-you-go plan with no data, though, so he`ll have to manage things on his own budget and using the school wifi. I’ll probably give him a top up here and there. Hopefully he won’t make me regret this. He’s a good kid, though. The fight with Connor was just an unfortunate blip.

Anyway, Daniel came over to ask if I was okay. I was a bit taken aback because I didn’t think he’d been paying any attention to me at that point because things had calmed down and people were dispersing. I was sitting in a pretty isolated spot away from everyone, too. I stuttered a bit, saying that I was okay, just being a bit sentimental. He just gave me a look, drawing a sigh from my lungs. I quietly told him that, even though I’d been getting my life back on track and even had friends here now, there was a part of me that wasn’t expecting to get any gifts. Definitely not the thoughtful and expensive ones I’d been given by a lot of them, either. He nodded, then bit his lip shyly. I thought for a second that he felt bad because he hadn’t given me a gift but then he pulled a small envelope out of his back pocket. It was a gift card for the movies. He was a bit embarrassed that it was all he could think of that fit in his very small budget. Since his mother had disowned him, the only money Daniel had was the small allowance he received from the school. He felt especially bad after he opened my gift to him. I think I was able to convince him that it was totally fine, though. I told him about some of the lame gifts I gave Bobby, Jubilee and the others back when I was his age because I, too, had so little money. I insisted he enjoy the gift card with me, so we are going to go see the new James Bond flick when it comes out in a month.

Brunch was about what you’d expect it to be like. I sat with Daniel and a few of his friends, but I was feeling introspective, so I ate quickly and then took my leave. I wanted to grab a nap before some of the activities they’d planned for later in the day. Bobby had been generous enough to freeze solid a huge chunk of the lake before he left, so they were going to have a skate. It had also snowed the last few days, thick and billowy stuff, so there was going to be snowman building and snow fort construction contests as well. Knowing these teenagers all too well, I figured the fort competition would likely be followed with an intensely competitive snowball fight.

When I arrived upstairs, I stripped down to my boxers and started to walk to my bed but suddenly I felt as if something on my desk was calling to me, sticking out from underneath a stack of work for the Big Gay Talk. It was the letter from Destiny. I had almost forgotten it was there. I opened the envelope slowly. There was a part of me that didn’t want to read it, not if she was going to tell me things about my future. The world has changed so much in the years since she passed, so who knows if it would be accurate or even relevant, and I really didn’t want to know. Or did I? That wrenching ambivalence was only a very small part of the emotions I was feeling, though. Mostly I missed her. I wanted to have this modicum of a connection to her even after all this time. When Destiny died something had changed inside me, something I would never be able to get back. For the first time, perhaps, I knew what it felt like to lose family. Real family. Not that sham I had as a kid with my sperm and egg donors. This was more than that, having part of my chosen family destroyed by an act not of my own making, to have them ripped away and not have any choice in the matter. Ours was a slap-dash family of circumstance, perhaps, but as I’ve aged I’ve found it easier to admit that’s what we were: her, Mystique and I. Maybe even Dom, too. Maybe.

Maybe not.

I lay down on my bed, took a deep breath and began to read. I could hear her kind, silken but wily voice narrating her writing in my head, even after all these years.

Dearest St. John,

If Raven has sent you this letter, then it means that I’ve finally met my end at the hands of fate and am unable to send you these Christmas greetings in person. I hope that my death did not leave you with too great a burden, but if you are alive and well enough to receive this greeting then at the very least the worst of the futures that I had foreseen for you have not come to pass. As I’m sure you have surmised, this letter is meant to be one of my ‘pushes in the right direction,’ though you may find this one more nebulous than some things I’ve told you in the past.

I’m curious as to exactly what sort of man you’ve become over the last decade. Both Raven and I have high hopes for you. She would never admit it, but you have become very special to her over the years and to me as well, though in not quite the same way. To me you are perhaps more like a grandchild, but then again I am almost 182 years old at the time I write this. Perhaps you have already come to the conclusion that we care about you, but it is nice to be able to put it to paper, to tell you for once. We have had to avoid it, for all of our sakes, because saying it aloud could make things much more dangerous and difficult should one of us pass prematurely. At least, that is what we’ve told ourselves, as foolish as it seems.

I know that you will have moved on with your life by now, and you will not have wasted the pardon we worked so hard to receive. Continue to follow your heart. I know you feel that you cannot trust yourself with your feelings, but they will guide you well. You are no longer the recklessly impetuous young man you once were. Well, perhaps you still remain a little impulsive but now tempered by hard experience. My advice for you, John, is that you must open your heart. Not just to love, although that has been creeping into your life in many different forms over the past few months, hasn’t it? It will continue to do so if you stay your course, and I am glad for it. What I would ask of you is that you also open your heart to forgiveness. Perhaps you already have, even if you haven’t realized it yet. But it is important to keep this front of mind going forward, as you will continue to confront clashes between old and new, between friend and foe, between your past self and the you of the present.

Forgive, St. John Sebastian Allerdyce. Let love flow within and around you, and dare to dream once more. Follow your heart, your personal truth, and seek out the bright destiny you truly deserve.

Love always,

Irene Adler