Before The Light Forgot Us

I Saw This and I Thought of You

Dec 15, 2024

There’s a peculiar & distinct alchemy to finding the perfect gift—a fervent, desperate, glittering search for the one thing that says it all without words. You don’t know what it is yet, but you’ll know it for sure when you see it. You move like a frantic mystic gift-diviner alive with trembling hands, through aisles upon aisles of possibility, whistling through the labyrinth of your own heart, searching for the talisman that screams of their very essence. It must be perfect—not expensive, not extravagant, but searingly right. In alignment. The world blurs; time folds in on itself. There it is! The thing. That thing! Ah, but of course! It couldn’t possibly have ever been anything else but this thing. It calls to you like leftover starlight brimming through a crack in the door of the universe. It whispers to you softly. “You, yes, you. Oi! I’m here. Where have you been? I’ve been waiting! Well, you’re here now. Let us begin immediately!”

You clutch it tight as though the universe might at any moment try to snatch it back. No Universe! It’s mine now, you get your ethereal hand-shaped bits of universe off, you saucy sod! It’s not just a gift. It’s a lifeline, a thread of recognition you send out into the cosmos to say: I see you. I love you. You are here, and you matter. We are all intrinsically linked by these golden threads, and we occasionally tug at them to make sure others are still close by. We don’t always have to attach little baskets to the threads and send down little shiny trinkets, but we do, and we can. It doesn’t even need to be a special occasion. Or even a gift. A message that reads “have you eaten today?” could be enough. Ah, the infinitely nuanced power of words.

This is what Christmas really should be: frantic, chaotic, radiant, and positively glowing with connection. Not a checklist but a ceremony, a wild and aching celebration of knowing and being known. A shimmer of divinity caught in the mortal act of giving. Gifts that don’t merely sparkle but blaze with the incandescent glow of thought, of care, of love so fierce it hurts just a little bit, y’know, around the edges. The perfect gift is not a thing; it’s a song. A hymn to connection.

I often wonder if the act of gift-giving (even something as seemingly small as the gift of a kind word, maybe even a comment, wink wink nudge nudge!) is how we prove we exist in each other’s worlds—a brilliant, tangled web spun from the threads of human connection. Crows bring their shiny trinkets, penguins exchange pebbles. Each gift shines with an almost unbearable beauty, coursing and radiating, like starlight caught in the act of becoming something more. Almost volatile. It’s never just the thing itself—it’s the frantic pursuit, the sleepless nights chasing that one perfect object, the crooked stained glass kaleidoscope of memories that makes you gasp when you find it. It’s the moment you clutch it to your chest, heart pounding, knowing deep in your bones, This is it. They know me.

Think of the battered paperback that inevitably shaped your friend’s life, its pages worn soft by the weight of their love forever thumbing through for favourite passages. Or the vinyl that echoes with the laughter and secrets of 2 a.m. conversations you can’t quite remember from ever so long ago now, furnished with a tiny little in-joke that still makes you laugh but you’re not entirely sure why anymore. Salmon in the sky! These gifts are fragments of us, torn lovingly from the fabric of our souls and hurled into the universe, desperate and hopeful, like tiny, lost & lonely satellites searching for a home among at least just one other. They whisper into the void, Please know me as I know you. Let this be enough.

Think of the times someone gave you a gift that felt as if it were plucked from the corners of your soul. Maybe it was a dog-eared copy of a book you once mentioned in passing, or a scarf in your favorite, oddly specific shade of green. Maybe it was something handmade, imperfect but bursting with care.

When someone truly knows you—your quirks, your loves, the little things that make you you—their gifts hit differently. They’re not just objects; they’re symbols. A thoughtful gift doesn’t just say, Merry Christmas. It says, I hear you. I know you. I love you.

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Before The Light Forgot Us
(What We Were Before You Took Your Socks Off and We Realised We Had Never Even Had a Real Conversation)

I should pin you to the wall / Not like prey, but like something sacred, a holy relic unearthed too soon, hung out on public display / There'll be trouble ahead. Your spine arching like the torrid wings of an albatross, suspended mid-flight, feathers caught up in the tension of wanting and being wanted / I don’t stop with you—I gather bodies like stolen artifacts, lips to lips, gender all but collapsing and blurred into the tender heat of hands foraging, into the shadow of thighs / the light of teeth glancing off of foreign skin. Tongues! Each touch is a theft, each breath a confession. I must have you /

Your body is not a museum. It's a crooked mausoleum / of grayscale half-truths and whispers, ready sea-salted everythings and more. It is graffiti daubed / into wet concrete, smeared and urgent, alive with the dripping rhythms of Vivaldi. All four seasons. I want to leave fingerprints everywhere, / they'll never find me, marks of our hunger, but they dissolve away under your sweat, frantic playful movements, writhing, your salt & grit & depth & ouch, your refusal to stay still. You are not one body. You are bodies upon bodies upon bodies / upon waves upon ceilings upon the smoothness of glass upon rubber upon yesterday's newspaper colliding with the barren / shores under twinkling spotlight, limbs fractured as the tide, going out and out and crashing down, tickling grains of sand between the teeth, and / blowing flotsam. Today, you are sharp angles and bitten nails; tomorrow, you’re soft flesh and the musk of unwashed sheets. I want to taste every version of you. And dip great swathes of warm bread / into your blurring creases. "I want to cover you in pepper and sneeze all over you." / Oh, Darling!

We press against each other, pelvis to chest, heart to hip. You say, "Take me apart," / I must, unmaking you shard by shard with my hands, piecing you back together in ways that defy the simple limits of organic chemistry—eyes where mouths should be, hands sprouting from your ribs. You let me build something new, something / terrible, something too beautiful to last. And we break it all down again. Next, it will surely be my turn. The unmasking is the hardest part /

You’re not the only one. Another waits—her skin is warming caramel, her voice honey dripped over razor blade's edge & soothing. Her eyes catch / against the heat of the pan and froth with intent. Her laugh tastes like blood and oranges, though never blood oranges. A third slips in through an open window, and their body is too a mosaic of scars, their sexuality a question I’m too afraid to answer / Though I never question the parts I place on the bedside table. I trace the shapes of all of them, layering them like frescoes over walls of flesh, pulling taut / the starched fabric over frames of sloshing bone & stoic broth. I don’t want to capture this. I want to destroy it, to leave it broken / on the floor, shapes of you whittled thin enough with delight to slice open the sky and drink from its tear-stained rim. Cloudy with a chance of overalls.

Naked isn’t the absence of clothes; it’s the presence of truth, pure / jagged and mighty feral. You laugh when I call you beautiful. You spit in my face and call me / a liar. But then lean close and whisper, “Do it again.” And I do, because this is how we survive. How we endure / each other. How the universe secures us in place. We paint over wounds, kiss over bruises, leave stains where the light can’t reach. Make shards of us in each other's eyes. It's delicious, all of it. I want to lick the shreds from my fingertips, and curl you out from under my fingernails. Grab your coat, you're pulled /

Your body is not art. Rarely would you ever dare to be something so simple. Tactile. It’s the knife cutting through canvas, traversing sails on a hijacked pirate's ship, the ricochets of fire swallowing the gallery whole, popcorn sweet & salty at the Barbie movie. America Ferrera, you beauty. You are the artist, the muse, the arsonist, and I—I am only the ash left behind, clinging to the edges / of your breath, only an echo / of who we once were. Together / Stubbed out and still glowing. Just about.

this is not love/it is not lust/it is not art/ It is every moment harmoniously re-dubbed over frenetic stop-motion animation, fraying between scenes, mottling together in a mess of paint and sweat and saliva, each fresh stroke / an offering, each kiss a baggage claim, a violent whisper to be heard, felt, devoured, seen. You are not a body. Only clay softened by the heat / of bodies. You are—a cathedral, your breath altered, your outstretched battlefield, I claim and destroy in one motion, over and over. Every inch of you, bathed in oil, in heat, in our own / desperate, contorted thirst. I trace the curve of your collarbone with a sixth sense manifested by exhausting / & overwhelming the other five simultaneously.

Your skin—it is a map of every thing I have crinkled, each ruin I have faultlessly abandoned, and yet I press myself / against it. Can’t decide now whether to beg for mercy or howl for something more / More of this / More of everything / The moan of your name on my lips is a shrieked prayer / for reprieve—sprawled out / on the floor of this wreckage, drenched / in the sins we’ve committed without / apology. You are my icon, my deity, and yet you are so much / more—the blood in my veins, the dark / kiss of desire threading through each micro-movement. You breathe life into me, and I breathe fire / back into you. Act I, Act II, Act III, curtains. Searing at the close/

I take you in fragments—the delicately out-sketched arch of your back, the way your hands fumble and push against / my chest, the pulse between your legs as though you can’t stand / being apart, as though we aren’t already / fused, already ruinous. And you insist, pulling me deeper into this festering / whirlpool, this beautiful destruction, where nothing / exists but us, limbs tangled, breaths ragged. But you insist. I implore. I break you open, carve / this fever into the night like sun-soaked glitter in a fetid glue, falling away / to the floor and crumbling in interminable / wordlessness, and all our deaths count to five at once. Dethroned / & golden with pulsing & syrup, we sliver away secrets to just behind the reach of our eyes, and smile. A wicked smile. Cruel intentions /

I'm sorry I dropped you. I broke it, and so by the laws of this makeshift / pop-up Parnassus, I must by now have bought you / a thousand times over. Won't you ever forgive me? I wouldn't if I were, you were, me were, oh no, don't. Oo-er, stop / it now!

Why It Matters
The exchange of money in a Christmas card can feel cold, distant, almost like a box ticked off a list. Sure, cash has its place—it’s practical, it’s useful—but it’s also impersonal. The joy of Christmas isn’t in the transaction; it’s in the thought. In that moment of recognition when someone unwraps a gift and gasps, “How did you know?”

Thoughtful giving shows you’ve paid attention, that you’ve invested time and energy into understanding someone. It’s a small act that says, You are not invisible to me.

I don’t know about you, but I live for the anticipation of gift-giving. I agonise over the perfect choices, picturing the way my loved ones’ eyes will light up. When I see something that feels like them, I can’t help but smile. It’s not about impressing them or outspending anyone—it’s about connection. About saying, This made me think of you.

The moment their fingers tear into the wrapping paper and their face shifts—maybe from curiosity to delight, maybe to tears of recognition—that’s the true gift. In that moment, money feels meaningless. What matters is the joy, the love, the knowing.

A truly meaningful gift tells a story. It weaves together memories, conversations, and shared moments. It says, I see you, and I value you. And in giving it, we’re reminded of our own humanity, of our capacity for care and connection.

Let this Christmas be a reminder to slow down and think about the people you love. What makes them laugh? What makes their eyes light up? What small thing could you give that would make them feel seen?

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