I'm Your Christmas Light. - by Oluwatobi Kolawole

The evening closed with a musy feeling hanging over my head. I was the last to leave the white lights, air-conditioned environment of this office space, and the real feeling is like an evening with Olivia Dean playing somewhere as you watch the sun set on the horizon. It's the end of all new year anecdotes, and people are forced to pack the Christmas lights and explain to the kids why they're not supposed to be there anymore. It's hard trying to explain to kids that what has a beginning has an ending. Adding to that is that this is also the cut-off season, where people who don't even know you decide to cut you off. So somewhere in my consciousness, I'm also a Christmas light. The thought sits with me, and I question the realism attached to it, because I probe my thoughts and criticize even my own existence. Some days, I can't shake off the feeling that humans use themselves to meet basic needs. Perhaps, it's also because I felt the new year brought in an unexpected need for closure…nothing else explains statements like "…You are genuinely one of the smartest people I've ever met, and I admired how you balanced spirituality with a touch of crazy.…Even though we are in a season of silence now, I find the thought of you soothing. I just wanted to send this out to say: I see you, I appreciate the time we had, and I hope life is treating you kindly."Treat me like Christmas lights. And even I would do the explanation to the kids about why I have to be away once the work and school routine kicks back in. I think the kids would understand times and seasons. And the lucid, unfiltered explanation that when life seems too ordinary, we'd need things to make us feel like we, or the place we are in life, is special enough to accommodate our untamed desires. I'd use their birthdays and the gifts that come with that day as anecdotes to buttress my points. I think the kids will understand. --- I have thought about having kids, a boy, and if that boy turns out anything like me, he would probably exist somewhere on the autism spectrum. With no neat explanation for why abstractions make sense to him, he would grasp ideas people struggle with, and then struggle deeply with the ideas everyone else finds simple.I imagine him at six, and I already feel pity for him. Confused by the coordination required to ride a bicycle, yet soothed by the calm that follows finishing homework, he would need someone to talk to. All I would hope is that I am there. To listen. To watch him think. To hold his thoughts without judgment.At fifteen, I would watch him arrive at sensual awareness, whether through puberty or through films watched casually with adult uncles. He would need someone to talk to about what he feels, but the religious environment around him that screamed at me would also insist to him that such conversations are forbidden. He would shrink inward, worried that his thoughts are corrupt, convinced that he needs deliverance from himself and from the things he has consumed.His autism would push him toward an unhealthy thirst for intelligence. Literature would move him, though not early. Still, everything he experiences would quietly prepare him for the emotional attachment he would later form with books.He would top his class most of the time and be accused of arrogance because of his reticence. He would have few friends, and once school ended, distance would inevitably dissolve whatever camaraderie they once shared within classroom walls.The reward for his academic excellence would come mostly from school. At home, his parents would be too familiar with the idea that what he does cannot easily be replicated, not even by his siblings. Over time, they would grow complacent about his achievements until the day he would choose independence.At thirty, he would find himself irritated by how women send birthday messages to men they do not love, men who still spend on them, layering empty gratitude over the day with phrases like "thank you for all you do," as though acknowledgment alone is proof that a king was born.He would cringe at shallow statements crafted to soothe religious crowds, and that irritation would shape his pursuit of the holy. What it truly is. How worship ought to be practiced with understanding, not performance.His over-certainty in opinions would constantly strain his relationships. His refusal to bend around sacred cows would become a deal breaker in many spaces. He would barely notice, but his face would always betray him. It would reveal everything his mouth chose not to say.And when he seeks solace in the people who choose him, he would discover that, like me, he is only a Christmas light. They would list his virtues. His heart. His writing. His intelligence. His self-awareness. His humor. His hospitality. How faithfully he shows up for the people he loves.But they would not want him beyond that, because he would be difficult to live with. He would speak little, observe much, and act without explanation. That silence would irritate them. Especially his inability to share what troubles him, and the way, even in the warmth of good company, at the most crucial moment, he would say nothing, almost like a disappearance.The very things that have burdened me would guide him, and the books that saved me would find their way to him. In that, I find comfort. I do not wish to be a perfect parent. I only hope to be good enough. Good enough to teach him how to grieve, how to settle gently into himself, how to desire knowledge, how to observe with wonder, and how to love with stoicism. To accept every flaw that comes with being human.All I would hope is that I am there. To listen. To watch him think. To hold his thoughts without judgment. --- When I listen to Olivia Dean again and consider the jazzy feeling of my own enjoyment, I gain a new perspective on myself as an observer. Slow, with the lights above my head, and my personality magnified. Rummaging through a musical preference that no one understands most time. And when I crouch to explain to the kids, I see myself in them. I, as a child, overestimated my importance in the lives of people I'd come across. But that's what the innocence of childhood offers us. An essence, until that expression is vitiated by disappointments repeatedly. I remember what being a kid looked like, how value was placed on performance, and not rewarded accordingly. The fatigue hit me from an early age, and though my achievements made my people proud that they bore me, they forgot that I just wanted them to see me, for who I was. Not for who I made them become in the eyes of others. Not like Christmas lights. --- Author's Note.Back to work, and I must confess that it's hard to just adjust after a long holiday. Amorim got sacked as Manchester United head coach, and I don't know how to feel about it. I should be happy, but I'm not. And it's for reasons like posterity that make my heart juggle without rhythm. I can't see any roadmap to success for this team that I have loved since I was a teenager. But I'd be here, in the bad times and the good times. I have clear plans for this year, and I owe that clarity to my dad for choosing, deliberately, to be a father about it. He wrote them out, line by line, and insisted we talk through them together. There was kindness in that gesture, the quiet kind that steadies you without asking for gratitude.I am not sobbing over being cut off from people who once wanted to be lovers. That season has passed. I have arrived at an acceptance that makes room for such endings, and even if I were to change, it would only be because something needed fixing, not because I was afraid of loss.I think that for the best of us, alignment does not come easily or often. We do not truly fit with everyone we meet. It may sound like superiority, and you may allow it to appear so, because I do not yet have a gentler way to tell the truth.

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