I made the prompt for this one on the Writer’s Mess. I was thinking happy destination christmas, Mele Kalikimaka, and instead got an unhappy woman freshly divorced and mourning the idea of her husband and the loss of the extended family. I wish I could say the next one would be happier, but apparently I am not a happy person.
She stared out at the beach and all she felt was loneliness. She should be happy, it was the trip of a lifetime, but spending the holidays alone…
It was better than being at home though, if she could call her studio apartment a home. This time last year she was in a house full of people, married, planning for kids. Then Tom decided that he was more interested in screwing his secretary than he was in a future with her.
She took him for everything, her lawyer was divine, but she was being practical, no huge decisions so soon after a loss like that. It was a loss, not Tom, because he was an ass. It was the idea of Tom, the family she had never has as a child. It was Tom’s sisters, and his parents, and his aunts and uncles. It was 27 people jammed in a 3 bedroom house, so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think, and she loved it.
She loved it so much that she ignored the affair at first. They had been married for 6 years, but if she was honest with herself, she saw the signs about year 2. She let it go though, pretended that she being paranoid, because she loved the life she had, even if she didn’t really love Tom that much.
She let it go on longer than she should have, and it was only when he came home, drunk, reeking of sex, his clothes mussed, that she finally reached that breaking point.
In the end they sold the house, she didn’t want it, and more importantly she didn’t want him to have it. Every time she walked around town though, all she could see was the life they had planned to live, and as the holidays approached it got worse.
So she entered a raffle, for a destination holiday, and won. It was a trip for 2, but none of her friends would leave home for the holidays, so she went alone. She sat on the beach watching the waves roll in and swore to herself: Next year would be better.
Anne McSommers' Writing Nook 