and away

5:30 AM on the dot Christmas morning the little black radio that was my sister's with its scratchy speaker that during the day barks out the voices of NPR over the sounds of the dishwasher humming and the dogs pacing the floor...turned ON. 
Into the darkness of a house trying to stay asleep a little bit longer, 'beneath the new fallen snow',  a voice said, "Merry Christmas" and Christmas music began playing.

I jumped out of bed. Hit the stairs running but at the edge of the kitchen, I paused. For a small moment I was unsure of what I thought I might find on the other side of a room lit only by drifts of snow covering the deck outside. 

In the far corner, shoved above the coffee maker, nesting on a wooden peg rail cluttered with forgotten drying mugs & drinking glasses a little black radio. It is probably one of the few things I have left of hers.  All the stuff, the clothing, the dishes, the scraps of papers, that I bagged up from her stale, fragile apartment and heaped into the little house on 10th- most of them are gone now.  Slipped out the cracks and faded away. Decomposing like memory, and faith. 

But not this radio.  A piece of junk and wires with a memory somewhere locked inside its circuitry of a time when she was alive and set an alarm because she had something to do that day... 

Over the years the radio has turned on in patterns we haven't figured out.  I'm sure it's a glitch.  My kids are sure it is my sister.  3:30 AM, midnight, 4:13 AM, 8:20 PM, and on Christmas morning 5-fucking-thirty. 
I turned the radio off which was harder than it should have been because it was already OFF.  I had to turn it ON then switch it back to OFF to stop the morning music from pouring out.  I stood in silence waiting to assess the damage.  

For days, no weeks, okay a year, I have been stretched too thin. I can feel the tightness in my neck.  See the effects on my body.  A steady pain my chest, a chronic headache; I know I have to find a way to unbury myself but I can't seem to find a place to set it all down. 
I keep saying tomorrow, but tomorrow never comes knocking for me. It always seems to be someone else's day.  So I wait on the Hillary Step of age and feel the same tiredness building that took me out of school. The same unshakable anxiety.  The same ghosts closing in.

Even BC feels the same to me as he did back then.  His hair long and curling, unkept like it was when our family was young and harshly divided.  A line right down the middle His and Hers. Beach a sort of an entangle piece of common ground. Most defiantly she was always mine, often his, but mostly she was solidly herself. Except in moments like islands in an ocean when she belonged solely to her biggest brother who won her whole heart by singing her silly little songs.  

I breathed out, oh Beach. 

I remembered the way it felt to run the hospital stairwells in a white coat. The slimness of self that walked in blue scrubs. The way books & bodies smelled among the medical stacks late into dark, snowy nights. 

You don't miss it, I have to remind myself.

Then across the room a small grayish figure padded by behind me. "Good morning, mom. Merry Christmas!" She said as she slipped up the stairs to wake her father, a half hour before the pre-agreed upon hour.  
No doubt feeling fully justified in capitalizing on the strangeness of a haunted radio taking all the blame for the broken 6 AM treaty of Christmas morning 2015.  

Not her fault that her mother has ghosts....haha   

"Not even remotely funny," I told the Radio. 

But I switched the coffee pot from auto to ON because I had heard what the music was saying, your tomorrow is already here.  It is time to get going. 

It's Christmas.