Full-blooded nights of twelve or thirteen hours
are one of my favourite Christmas traditions,
spent having you all to myself,
collecting the years I didn’t know you
greedily together
in one room of deep reds.
We watch rubbish movies
as you pull my cardigan close around yourself;
it swallows you up.
I don’t love you.
Not like that, anyway,
I say it again, again,
again, until the words become
your name.
I want to be the knit stitch of my own cardigan –
weave myself into you.
Characters laugh and the film
fades in and out.
The slow, content, silence grows
and I smile for tradition.
