sugar cookies

It started with sugar cookies.

Some of my happiest memories are of baking sugar cookies. We always made a huge batch right before Christmas. Our entire table would be covered in flour and cookie cutters and a million different sprinkles and bowls of different colored frosting. All four of us kids would be sitting at the table, sticky with frosting and giggling. I didn't even like sugar cookies, but I loved making them because it made my mother so happy. I loved watching her decorate the cookies. Her thin hands moved so carefully, so confidently. She would smile as she piped frosting in her beautiful calligraphy. Her cookies looked like something out of a magazine. They were so delicate. I would try so hard to mimic her movements, but mine became sloppy red and green candy canes and smudged Christmas trees with uneven sprinkle ornaments.

I never minded though. She was happy.

This morning I turned on some Christmas music. I cleaned the kitchen. I addressed the last of my Christmas cards. I even ate lunch.

And I felt so normal.

So I decided to make sugar cookies.

Halfway through, I just stopped.

I was standing in my kitchen. The Mr. was upstairs. I could hear him humming, but I was suddenly struggling to breathe under the crushing knowledge that I was so alone.

I tried to reason with myself. I wasn't alone. I knew that. The Mr. was just one floor above me. Sure, my siblings had all traveled the thousand something miles to my parent's house for Christmas, but they weren't gone. Yes, my best friends were all out of town, but they weren't gone either.

I couldn't understand it then, and I still don't now. I didn't just feel it, I knew that I was completely and utterly alone. It was like the floor had dropped out from under me. Everything had inverted. I was upside down.

I was curled up on the couch, unfinished sugar cookies covering the kitchen table, when the Mr. came downstairs. He looked at me, then at the table, and I could see him trying to put the pieces together.

"I'm tired." I said.

He offered to make the frosting, and I let him. I watched him measure the sugar and the milk and debated throwing the entire batch of cookies into the trash. Instead we frosted them together, and I smiled and laughed to keep from crying.

Until I couldn't anymore, and then I just cried.

So the Mr. held me as I cried, the table still a disaster of brightly colored frosting and rogue sprinkles and a million different bowls.

"You were so happy earlier." The Mr. finally whispered.

He didn't make it a question, but I knew it was one anyways. What happened? I was happy earlier. I was almost convinced that I was normal.

Then I made sugar cookies.