It's Never Just Goodbye // Ed Sheeran

Christmas Dinner and Molly

Alice

Finely is crying. Adam has the football game volume up to fifty. My father is yelling at someone over the phone. My mother is in the kitchen cooking dinner and the oven fan is blasting. Two of my aunts – my mother’s sisters, Aunt Caroline and Aunt Reanna, are on the couch talking rather loudly about their ex-husbands.

And me… Well, I’m overwhelmed. On the couch, bouncing the baby on my knee, and hoping he stops. “Alice,” my father says, mouth away from the speaker of his cell phone, “Why don’t you take the baby upstairs.”

To him, I’m the reason everything is so loud.

I carry Finn up the stairs of my old childhood home and the loud noises behind me fade into the distance. The upstairs cold and bright and clean. I guess it seems almost empty in a way. I open the door to my own room and it’s oddly comforting.

Holidays were always so packed with a house that’s so small. Last year, was different. My mother and father were divorced their first year and only her and I spent Christmas together. I don’t remember knowing if I was pregnant or not at Christmas last year.

This year, it feels like things are back to normal with Finn added to the whole scene. My mum invited my father to eat for dinner after his girlfriend dumped him. My two aunts were always here first and the rest of the family is yet to come.

Finley tries to crawl away on my old bed, but I stop him. Lipstick stains cover his cheek and with my thumb, I wipe them away as much as I could. “You were attacked by the aunts, huh?” I say and he laughs.

The room looked much like it always did with less of my clothes and everything more organized. It’s cold and I liked that when I was younger, but now it just itched me the wrong way. When I’m at the apartment Oscar and I share, I always miss this room. Yet, being here just feels wrong and leaves me empty.

While Finn crawls across the carpet slowly, I inch around my room. Looking for anything that could make the things in here seem like mine. The old certificates and pictures of my old friends and I just leaves me feeling nothing. And soon, it seems like I’m not even the old Alice and the one in all the pictures is gone.

The clothes I left behind are clothes I wouldn’t fit in anymore. Tiny shirts that showed a lot of cleavage or shorts that were too short. Dresses that just didn’t seem right to wear anymore now that I had a new life.

I’m the only one who feels this way when visiting home, I think. The one who longs for her old life but doesn’t at the same time. Because when I look down at my son, I don’t want to leave this moment. I don’t want to go back to the moments in the pictures hanging above my bed. Thinking about my teenage years and the parties and the boyfriend and the old friends suddenly makes me feel faintly sick. Almost as if I was on a boat that wouldn’t stop rocking.

And I never want to go back to a moment where I ever felt the way I felt when I was in that life.

My finger drags across Kim’s face and I debate whether I should rip down the picture altogether and throw it away or not. I decided against it and let my eyes wander over every inch of her smile. I hated her, I did. Maybe I’m just now getting this, but she’s always been this huge bitch. Cruel. Manipulative. Since we became friends, she’s has the upper hand on things.

She always put me down.

Maybe I don’t hate her, I think to myself. Yeah, we had a fight. And telling her that she isn’t allowed to visit is something I’d flip out over too if I was her. I just wish she knew my secret and I could trust that she wouldn’t tell anyone.