A Lover of Rain

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT:

Christmas has always been a part of our culture to spend time with your loved ones and show appreciation to one another by giving gifts. Family members would gather in one house to have a communal meal together. Each part of the house would be busy like children running around in the living room playing silly little games, or the adults gathering around the kitchen to either make a meal or drink wine and talk about what they've missed in each other's lives. That ridiculous tale of Santa Claus climbing down the chimney to give good children gifts although in reality, it's just the parents dressed in a red costume and white long beard. A lot of things happen during Christmas that one person might depreciate, but the important value of Christmas is bringing loved ones together. Although for this year, I will be spending it alone. It wasn't because I don't have any family to go to–I have friends who have offered their homes to welcome me for this important holiday. The fact that I will be alone for Christmas was solely my decision.

At first, it was a plan to get rid of my friends in the house and dawdle on my self-pity and drown myself in sorrow until they had to get back before the new semester starts. But after more than a week of Eric visiting me in the house to help me get back on my own feet I realized what I was doing was an unhealthy way of coping with the pain and the longer I do it, the more I would get stuck.

I would just continue sinking until it was too late to escape. I wasn't moving on yet because I didn't want to. I kept making excuses to myself so I wouldn't have to accept that Julian and I were already done. Though I have always known it was my fault that I lost him, the guilt and regret for all the things I have done makes it hard to accept. Just because I'll move on doesn't mean I have to forget. I just have to move forward in my life and be better so when I look back into all the good times Julian and I shared, it won't be painful to remember.

So, what better way to move on with your life than spending Christmas doing the things that you like and rebranding yourself? The first thing I did was to stroll around the mall–overspending my savings on new clothes, trying out that sushi restaurant that opened a few weeks ago but haven't tried yet, giving myself a white french tip nail extensions, and that one universal rule of moving on: getting a new haircut. I got rid of the red highlights by coloring my hair black and cutting my long hair that already reached my lower back to a straight shoulder-length haircut. I came out of the salon looking like a new person, ready to face new adventures I'll be facing in the next upcoming year whatever it may be.

Before going home, I took the time to buy decorations for Christmas Eve later. Ornaments, christmas lights, fake snows, a mistletoe, a lot of garlands, and anything I saw Christmas-related I could get my hands on. I already have a design in my head that I can do in the living room that I've always wanted to do since seeing it on Pinterest this summer. It was too late for me to buy a big Christmas tree to put in the house, so I did a quick and efficient design to still give our home a smudge of Christmas spirit. While I was waiting for my food delivery, I started putting garlands on the wall near our TV. I taped it on a wall in a zigzag style from top to bottom–forming the garlands into a Christmas tree.

I took out my instax portable photo printer that I bought as a gift for myself earlier to try it out. I printed a picture of the five of us that we took at the falls as a test print and I was surprised at the quality of the picture. Although it came out as the size of a polaroid picture, it was still perfect for my self-made tree. I clipped the picture at the very top on the lights I wrapped around following the zigzag format of the garlands.

Soon after, I found a new enjoyment of printing our digital pictures from my phone into a physical photo I could hang on my Chritstmas tree. There's some solo pictures of my friends that I took and vice versa. Most of it were pictures of us together doing random things from different periods of our life. I even found a picture of me, Yohan, Jae, and Kylo when we graduated senior high.