You be my Christmas, Snowy. Keep me company this holiday season, that’s all.

No Forevers for me, now.

Forever lasted only four years and 17 days and left me with this I-am-sorry-note on a neon post-it stuck under the coffee machine, this black-and-white check scarf hung between my coats, and a weight pulling me down like dumbbells attached to my body parts.I’d seen that little minx and the sorcery in her mascaraed caramel eyes ─ the liquid ones made to steal ─ as they bore into his. She’d smiled at me wicked as she sized up my full body.

But, she was not the first to have caught his gaze.Soon, my dinners ran cold and I slept, head on the table, waiting. Foreign smells danced in the closet. The succulents on the kitchen windowsill started to wilt.I worried, but not much. Forever had enough sinew and tendon to survive her. But, I was wrong: she was a force and Forever was still a child with brittle bones.

Now, I keep the sorry-note in my size-40D bra, a weighty lesson: never again.

You, Snowy, just be outside my window till New Year’s. That’s all. Watch me undress and dress and brush my long hair and paint my lips. I’ll gouge your eyes out if they stray.

I’ll wrap the check scarf around your neck, and let me take a picture of us to send to the happy folks who keep flooding my mailbox with their arms-around-each-other holiday cards.