Christmas Omission

The frost had settled on the churchyard grass,
a thin white quiet over everything.
Inside, the bells had rung for charity.
People gathered, coats brushed clean of snow,
voices carrying easily through the hall.

No one thought to ask if I was there.

Christmas, they call it—
the season for the poor, the stranger,
the extra place laid out beside the fire.
The words are said every year
with the same comfortable certainty.

Yet somehow the message missed my door.

It was not a grand refusal.
Nothing so obvious.
Only a silence where a name might have been,
the careful turning away of eyes
as though omission were harmless.

Still, it stung more than I expected.

You think by a certain age
you have learned the ordinary shapes of hurt—
how belonging works,
how easily the circle closes.

But the heart remembers earlier winters,
when being called inside
meant proof that you existed.

I did not want their best wine
or the bright laughter that follows it.
Only a chair for an hour.
A place at the table
where bread passes from hand to hand
without calculation.

Strange, how people who speak most easily
about love
manage these small evasions.

No cruelty—
only the absence of kindness,
which leaves almost no mark
except the hollow it makes.

Still, the night goes on.

Beyond the windows the frost continues,
steady and indifferent.
Somewhere a bird sings in the dark
without waiting to be invited.

Perhaps that is enough.

They can keep their careful celebrations.
I will walk home through the cold
and carry the small flame I have left—
not much,
but mine.