Merry Christmas, I miss you
There is something about Christmas that remembers people for us.
Perhaps that is why the season has always felt heavier than the snow it promises. Lights begin to fill the streets, familiar songs return as though they had never left, and for a moment, the world believes that everything broken can somehow find its way home.
But Peter had already learned that not everything lost is meant to return.
He once believed that memories belonged to those who lived them. That no matter how much time passed, no matter how life changed, the people who once held pieces of our hearts would always carry traces of us within theirs.
He was wrong. He realized memory could disappear while love remained. Perhaps that was its cruelest miracle.
To remember someone who cannot remember you.
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To know the warmth of a hand that now feels like the touch of a stranger. To carry conversations that only one heart can still hear. To stand before someone who once knew every quiet part of you, only to become another unfamiliar face passing through their day. To her, he was nothing more than another face passing through the city.
But Peter remembered enough for the both of them. He remembered the way she looked at him before, he remembered conversations that now existed nowhere else but within him. Every memory they had once shared had become something only his was left to carry.
Forgetting is merciful only to the one who forgets. The one who remembers is left carrying two lives — one that continues, and one that no longer exists anywhere except within them.
Maybe that is why Christmas hurts in ways no other season does. It has a way of returning to places time insists have already been left behind.
Peter never wished for MJ to remember.
Not because he had forgotten what they once were, but because some forms of love ask for nothing in return. They simply remain, even when there is no one left to remember where they began.
And that was the cruelest thing about memory. It can disappear from one heart, yet continue living in another as though nothing had ever changed.
And maybe Christmas was never painful because it reminded people of what they had lost. Maybe it was because it reminded Peter that somewhere beneath the same lights, the same songs, and the same sky, there existed a life only he could still remember.
A life where she once knew his name.
