hospital vespers

christmas decorations

December 12, 2025

i dislike december. i dislike getting up early to shovel snow and scrape off my car windshield before going to work. i get annoyed strapping on my cramp-ons to trudge to work. i dislike happy families and santa photos and the pretty girls in their christmas sweaters planning hallmark holiday movie marathons with mistletoe manhattans and peppermint mochas.

i am resentful that a holiday that should be one of cheer, is one forever associated with my father’s death. two years ago, he died just a few days before christmas. i did not realize that 2022 would be my last christmas with him. this year will be the third christmas without him and i dont understand because like, he was just here.

he was just in the living room laughing over national lampoons christmas vacation. he was just in the kitchen sneaking after eights and toblerone even though he had diabetes and probably shouldn’t have.

on the way home from the hospital, where my dad died, i saw christmas lights and santa hats and candy canes and it seemed so ghoulish and uncanny – this reminder that while the world ended for me in that hospital room, it just kept right on turning outside. i felt sea sick.

my tiny ukrainian mother and i drank coffee and watched the sun come up in silence.

we ate mcmuffins.

she went home to make phone calls and i sat in my house staring at my yule goat christmas stocking and tiny skinny christmas tree until i couldnt see straight and i was overcome with this violent urge to just rip it all down. those decorations were repulsive to me on that morning.

last year, i put the tree up in a haze. i grumpily purchased a few second hand christmas tree decorations at the thrift store. i cried when one of my yule goats began losing his red ribbon. i was a dark cloud hovering just above the joy of the other people in my life.

this year, i felt the dread creep in right around the end of november. her death anniversary comes first. december 4th. nine years this year.

then two years without my father december 18th. three years without my uncle december 23rd. two years without my other uncle december 30th.

then january coming and not looking much better. my family acknowledged three aquarian birthdays. my maternal grandfather january 28th, mine the 29th and my father’s the 30th. it’s just me now.

my close friend died the 31st. drugs, of course. slipping away in the night.

this wintery liminal space of death and gingerbread houses.

i vow to not be an asshole this year and make my grief everyone else’s fucking problem, but those are easy words to say with much more difficult follow through.

i put off putting up the tree.

and then one night with a burst of energy i drag it out from under the stairs and up it goes and it stands there staring at me. i find some vintage angel ornaments at the thrift store and hang those first. there’s twelve angels and each of the angels gets a dead persons name and i cry myself to sleep that night and dream about angels and cedar.

i find a pair of homemade angel wings in the overflowing section of Christmas garbage at a thrift store. they light up and cost $3 and i buy them and bring them home and i put up christmas decorations dressed in white like a cult leader or yoga teacher. the wings light up and i burn a cinnamon candle and sing “god rest ye merry gentlemen”.

i hang a shitty wreath on my door and put the tree skirt on the skinny tree that i got at canadian tire.

i hang up my yule goat christmas stocking.

the house smells like mint and cinnamon and mandarin oranges and chocolate and i could swear i hear my father in the kitchen looking for cookies. but it isn’t him.

at least i put the tree up.
something wrong with that girl

December 11, 2025

there’s something wrong with that girl.

heard it the first time when i was just a kid. an adult speaking to another adult at the christian school i attended. i knew they were talking about me but i didn’t know why.

maybe it was the swan dive i took off the top of the slide and cracked my tooth up but good. i didn’t cry that day either, just picked myself up and kept on screeching my way through the playground. the nice teacher with her gold cross and hairy legs (first time id ever noticed that women have hairy legs) gave me extra colouring pages and a juice box for not crying. what i would give now for the same! maybe i would never cry again if a lady with big boobies and hairy legs and expensive jewelry bribed my tears away.

heard it in school later from the other kids. from girlfriends and boyfriends, managers and coworkers, pastors and the tired lady who ran sunday school. heard it from my family too. i sang too loud and wasn’t afraid of anything. standing even now at only 5ft/152cm, i’ve always big opinions in a little body.

something wrong with that girl who put snakes inside the my little pony dream house and got covered in ticks one summer and crashed my bike and read so many books that a nice old teacher bought me lunch at a shitty cafe because she’d never ever seen someone read so much. i was only ten when i read all of those weird caveman sex books in the “clan of the cave bear” series.

they called me old soul and called me gifted, too. never had to try hard or buckle down. words and writing and art came easy always. friendship and social norms never came easy if they came at all.

but the world and society and rules and values and morals have ways of cutting the wings of those whose difference is not immediately exploitable.

they called me troubled and i am still.

maybe in another time id be an oracle but instead i eat lentil soup in an office.

i dont wanna talk about tv or the weather.

i want to hear you – the real you.

don’t sanitize or water it down.

tell me all your fucked up stuff.

i can take it.
the aries from sundsvall

December 10, 2025

im bad, hes worse, we’re already dead.

it’s complicated. we are complicated.

not just the ocean between us or the language.

but it’s in that slightly haunted look in our eyes that comes through in photographs and on facetime.

was it our dead fathers and our crucifixes that bridged those gaps?

hard to find love these days as a reluctant believer or a deranged dreamer.

he never loved someone before.

“jag älskar dig” he says.

”min älskling” he says.

”min ängel” he says.

i give him a silver cross necklace and cut his hair with a knife my friend made.

we kiss in airports and at costco and over fika.

he left clothes in my closet and i can’t look at them for too long or i get emotional.

he sends me a love letter. he never misses a “good morning babe” text. he likes me when im crazy or crying or rageful or content.

he disarms me with just a word.

how is it that ive come to love an aries?

a big mean ram unbothered by the churn of the water that pours out of my mouth and my eyeballs in equal measure.

heavy horns on his head like a crown, this man. all that swedish logic and silence.

my therapist asked me who my bridge was.

and it’s him.

this aries from sundsvall.
still the girl who takes off her beaded earrings to fight

December 9, 2025

i am still that girl. you know, the one who would take off her beaded earrings to fight.

still the girl that would happily finish what someone else started.

the first time it happened was high school and a boy who had relentlessly bullied me, pushed me to the last straw and i laid him out on the floor of the gymnasium and i beat him senseless while screaming. it took three teachers to pry me off of him and i fought them too, like a wild animal roaring all the way to the school office.

i cracked that boy’s nose and loosened a tooth. he bled like crazy while crying like a little bitch about it. i never cried when he would bounce the basketball off my head or arrive early to school everyday to scrawl “slut” or “whore” on my locker.

the day i rearranged his face, he kept bouncing the ball off my chest laughing about my tits.

i wonder if his nose is still crooked.

i wonder if he still thinks about that day.

i was suspended for a day for fighting and when my mother picked me up from school she took me for mcdonalds after screeching about sexual assault and harassment to the school workers in ukrainian. they could see where i got it from.

they didn’t argue with her and we left, two crazy bitches on our way to eat mcchickens in silence.

they called me crazy, you know.

maybe i was, but maybe they should have been looking at what made me that way.

people can only handle so much cruelty.

i never did anything to that little fuck aside from exist in a form that triggered him enough for him to desire to make me feel as small as possible in return. i wonder if he felt small that day through his tears and bloody nose.

i found out i hurt someone recently and i don’t care. this feeling of not caring makes me uncomfortable because generally im not that way anymore. years of healing and personal work and i take no pride or joy in taking out my earrings and squaring up anymore, even when I should.

fuck me over now and you’re done. access cut off and boundaries way up. i might not take off my beaded earrings as much anymore, because i use boundaries and silence now instead of my fists or teeth or nails.

i disappear and pray for people from the sidelines and i wonder if the great coyote or Jesus and all the angels bother to listen.

somehow that’s worse, i think.

most people would probably rather have the completion of an ass kicking instead of the cold unanswered silence that makes you wonder and can keep you up at night if the mood is right or the wind blows in the right direction.

i am in a strange mood this week and im hungry and restless and craving red meat and sugar. i crave my young lover and his crooked eye. i crave violence, too but not sure against whom. life, maybe?

if i could get ahold of the great coyote would we square up and gnash our rabid mouths until only one of us was left standing? could i fist fight an angel in the liquor store parking lot? get into a shoving match with one of the maenads and rip out our hair extensions and fake eyelashes?

i may fight my battles with silence and boundaries now. i might smudge and pray and read the bible sometimes or look for truth in tarot cards and plot my escape from samsara, but the girl that takes off her beaded earrings to fight, still lives inside my chest.

and, she is still listening.
excerpts from a love letter in swedish

December 8, 2025