Santa,

It’s been a hell of a long time, twelve years since you last received my letters. Instead of setting cookies and milk out for you, and celery for your reindeers, I started looking into cupboards.

My mother carried him, a gift at first and then a burden what with the adjusted angle of sleeping, sitting, sighing. She remembered oddly, her love for poetry, “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper,” and gave birth to a sleek silent baby, who turned blue, his breath only being pushed into him by a flock of medics. My mother named him after the man she’d studied in school. The boy she thought would collect, cherish and smile. The boy turned man, turned from her.

Is he on your naughty list this year? You’ll be pulling out your red marker again, blotting an “NB” next to his name. Or have you since updated, scrapped him completely? I forget the year he stopped believing, it’ll be in your records, but I think, that’s part of his problem.

A voraciously active kid with a mop of brown hair, and a lanky frame was only eleven turning forty seven. It was he who broke the promise that you had passed onto my mother, a series of Chinese whispers turned sour: don’t tell your sister.

Twelve years ago, on the night before Christmas, my brother ushered me into my parent’s room. A small television and the perpetual floral on the wall made the room seem all too quiet.

“Look at this,” he said, prodding a finger into the cupboard and fishing out the tweety bird t-shirt that I’d asked you for. He showed me the gameboy, silver and shiny in its packet. The department store paper bag mocking me, I didn’t ask the shopping centre to deliver these. I asked you, Santa.

“What?” I tried, my mouth failing to recognise defeat. My fingers lacing against the edge of my dress.
He laughed, laughed so hard he bent over, hand clasping a knee.

“He’s not real, you dumb arse.”
“He’s not real, he’s not real,” his voice still echoes, almost cruel with the joy expelled from the same shaped lips as mine.

This was my brother at an age where he hardly knew how to roll, let alone wrap his lips around a cigarette. Before he knew how to mould words like, “fucking moron” into weapons, before he went out, got fucked and just didn’t care.  

He had a pocket full of promises, full of holes, threadless and bare. He’d always swear he’d give me five bucks if I did something for him: get him a drink, get the ball out of the gutter. And then as I grew older, and less gullible, he gave help with homework, as if he believed that it was replacing the respect he took away.

Angry, that’s what he is, and was—and I have no idea why. He and I grew outside each other, a world away. Apart from the familiarity of hazel eyes and brown hair, we look nothing alike, and I know little of him.

Perhaps the most I know is the worst value in people. He’s completely selfish. I exist, and I alone. Loves the sense of control, the money, and I think the sound of his own voice.  It’s the words that are most difficult; you’d think I’d have them pretty down pat by now. Our verbal communication stops abruptly at “hi”, the rest remain in gestures involving waves. And sometimes it hurts to think about how I will never say “I love you” because who was I? Just a quiet school girl with a fascination for books, and what was I to know?

There are three cardinals to my brother: don’t wake him up in the morning, don’t get in his way, and don’t talk to him before 9pm.

But this letter isn’t about how I stopped believing. What I do believe, is that everything is circular, even you with your red fleece wrapped belly, swinging Christmas around again. It’s not about what I’m gaining. You see, it’s what I’m losing.

I think Beginnings define the endings—and in some cases are the endings. He stopped acting up—new school, cleaner plate—but gave all his bitter energy to others. I still don’t think he’s a giver.

Knowing that he has curved away was nothing to how I felt his hands take hold of my shoulders and shake them. This year, he flew at me, red in his own flurry. Folded with rage about something as simple as a power failure, he was like a child inflicted with a fever. Things were said out of a raised temperature, delirium was in his strained temple.  Things he won’t remember in a year to come. But I know I will, I remember too well how I’d climbed into the nest of trees and cried, cried until I felt each droplet leave my body, and splayed my fingers into the littered ground. With my throat trying to conceal the weep that spilled from my mouth, I felt nothing. Not even the sting of twigs, and an unlucky beetle crushing beneath my palms.

Until now my mother had bore the brunt of his carelessness, and now, I had seen the side of him that my mother had since used all her tears up on. I cannot say how time stopped, how my body refused to act according to neuron-to-limb communication. And sometimes, I will tell you, that perhaps it never happened.

So, I’m asking you. Give my mother her smile back; remove the weight of her bitterness, and clean the shoulders of my father, who stands back in the shadows gathering dust, and saying nothing. This year I ask that something be repaired, some one be surprised, and somebody be saved. Before the uneasiness of resentment and love is swept, and sucked dry into oblivion. Before it drags my mother and us all into it’s circle.

Kind Regards,
Amber.