I had a vague recollection of movement. I was standing, my eyes opened but the world blurred around me. It could have been tears, or fug, or a combination of both. But my single-minded focus was for that tree. I knew we still had it. If I found it, then I still had a part of her.
“Michael, what’s up?” That might have been Lee.
“Where are you going?” Definitely Adrian.
Sounds were emitted from me but even I wasn’t sure what I was saying, so I have no idea how Ryan understood it as: “The Christmas Tree? OK, let’s find it.”
I knew where it was though – where I always kept it. In the garage, in an old packing box. The dust would be caked on the outside, the age-old packing tape on the box had long since lost all it’s sticky and flapped away impotently at the open ends of the cardboard.
The dust fluffed around me as I opened the box and I pulled out the dark green artificial tree and it molted some of its plastic spiky artificial needles. It had been losing a few each Christmas for years and would, eventually, be bald. Just some taped wire rods where a dark green forest of leaves once hung.
The Christmas Tree’s smells filled me once again, transporting me back to that Christmas 13 years ago. It was then, holding that tree in the garage and surrounded by my friends that I realized that I had actually lost Tina forever.
Writing Crash Page 17