Chapter 5 – PRETTY BOY

The candle had been burning since morning.

Christmas had lit it before breakfast — just a glass of water and a angel wing pastry broken in half and powdered sugar on his fingers. Christmas never explained to anyone why he ate breakfast or how he ate it, because it was his table and his things and his focus, and explaining it to someone would have turned it into something else than what it was.

His altar was not like an altar in a church.

It was a table — a desk with battered edges, bought at IKEA three years ago, white, now a bit battered, with a mug ring in the upper left that Christmas never covered up, because he somehow considered it part of the thing.

On the table now in one corner was a candle, a glass with a little water, a few angel wing pastries in a small bowl — that bowl was originally for almonds, but Christmas had assigned it here to the ritual — and next to the bowl lay a scrap of paper folded into quarters. Christmas wasn't looking at it.

He knew it by heart because he had written it himself, and yet he didn't look at it, as if a direct gaze could cancel, misread, or change the thing written inside. The piece of paper was there and that was enough.

The candle was burning.

Prague in the morning light had a grey colour with a backlit gold — right where the sun wanted to be and nowhere else. The roofs below the window of Christmas's room were wet, the tiles glossy, and the chimney of the neighbouring house was exhaling a white streak of vapour precisely vertically, because there was no wind at all.

Christmas was sitting in front of the altar in his socks.

He was dressed — sweatpants, an old sweater, that blue one with the stretched-out collar that was old and comfortable enough for him to pull on without a second thought. His hair was a bit rumpled from the pillow. It was morning and he was at home and didn't have to go anywhere.

He took God's grace from the bowl.

It was one of those atypical pieces—the shape of a little mound, snow-white sugar on the surface that instantly sticks to your fingers, that crumbly texture inside when you break it. Christmas didn't break it. He just held it and stared at the candle.

The candle was burning.

The flame was steady, the candle burned straight and cast a round circle of light on the table, the bowl, and the piece of paper folded into quarters.

Dominik.

He didn't say the name out loud. It came of its own accord in the silence. Christmas sat with the name and did nothing with it. He just let it be there, like you let be a thing that belongs to the past.

Dominik.

Three syllables. Dominik was one hundred and eighty centimeters tall and had a habit of arriving late and had a habit of not explaining why and had a habit of touching Christmas's shoulder in such a way that he couldn't do anything else but kiss him. That was the Dominik Christmas knew.

He wasn't a bad person.

Christmas told himself that often and consciously, because it was easy to make a villain out of Dominik, and that would be insincere. Dominik was a good person who liked Christmas in a way that didn't involve responsibility. He liked him when they met. He liked him when Christmas was the one who waited. He liked him within the scope of what cost him nothing—and closeness without a price, Christmas needed to name that, and he named it: closeness without a price isn't closeness. It's courtesy. And then he stopped even being courteous and vanished behind a girl. Christmas sighed.

God's mercy in his hand.

Christmas turned it in his fingers and the sugar stayed on his skin. White dust on his fingertips—that's how God's mercies behave, there is something inevitable about it, as if they wanted to mark you, as if they were saying: you were here, you touched me, you mustn't just forget about me.

It was funny, a little.

Christmas looked at it and told himself: God's mercy is a small thing I am not supposed to forget.

And Dominik was a big deal who was exceptionally good at forgetting.

He left and came back and in the meantime lived differently, while Christmas was meanwhile like something left on a shelf. Dominik always knew where that shelf was, and came when it was on the way, and Christmas was there because — because what else. Because closeness, even incomplete, is better than nothingness. Because Dominik's hand on his shoulder was real, even if it lasted only a moment. Because Christmas was a romantic and romantics know how to build a bridge out of small things.

But even that bridge stopped being enough when he walked across it alone.

Christmas didn't know exactly when it happened. Maybe it was several situations, one after another, each minor, each of the kind where you can say: nothing happened, you're exaggerating. And then there were enough of them for the bridge to collapse.

Dominik never stayed overnight.

That was a fact. Christmas only realized it in retrospect — thinking about it at one in the morning in October, lying alone on the bed and looking at the ceiling, and the ceiling was uninteresting, and he told himself: Dominik never stayed overnight.

He always had a reason. He always had a legitimate reason, always plausible, always one you couldn't say no to — I'm waking up early, friends are waiting, the car is outside, it would be impractical. It was always logical.

And yet.

Christmas laid the angel wing back down into the bowl.

The sugar remained on two of his fingers—the index and middle fingers of his right hand. He looked at them. A white coating on the skin, a little grainy, a little sticky. The candle lit them up in gold.

There were still five angel wings left in the bowl.

Christmas had bought them himself three days ago—he walked to the pastry shop by the metro, the small one with the old display cases that sells sweets all through December, and bought a small bag. Not because he was particularly fond of them. More because they were Christmassy and he was a romantic, and romantics need symbolic things in December simply to make December make sense.

The angel wings were a symbolic thing.

Angel wing—there was anything in that name. Grace. Grace as a gift, as undeserved goodness, as a thing that arrives even when you've done nothing to deserve it, just because the world is sometimes surprisingly generous. Christmas believed in grace—not as a religious concept, but as a general possibility. That things would happen. That someone would come. That the world would answer.

Dominik was not an angel wing.

He was a good man, a handsome man, his touch was pleasant, but he didn't know how to stay.

Christmas looked at the scrap of paper folded into quarters.

He had written it the night three days ago—or four, time in December always blurred a bit for him. He wrote it because he needed to say something aloud, or at least in writing aloud, almost like a prayer. Unspoken things change with every thought, every small shift in perspective—like a photocopy of a photocopy, always a little different. A written thing remains.

The paper had three sentences on it.

Christmas knew them by heart.

First sentence: If Dominik returns of his own free will, I will let him come.

Second sentence: If he does not return, that is all right.

Third sentence: If someone else is to come, let it be someone who will not play games with me.

Three sentences, folded into quarters, next to a bowl of Christmas pastries and a candle. That was the whole altar. That was the whole wish—just three sentences on paper and a candle and a little sugar in the air.

Christmas was a romantic, not a fool.

He knew the world didn't work like an ordering system. He knew the scrap of paper wouldn't call Dominik back or summon a stranger from the ether. He knew that. Still, he wrote the note, because there is a difference between a written wish and an unspoken one—what is written is simply something you admit to yourself.

Christmas admitted to his wish.

The candle in the room flickered once—lightly, quickly—and then burned steady again. Outside the window, a pigeon walked along the ledge, one foot, the other foot, and vanished from view.

Christmas took God's grace once again.

This time he broke it.

The snap was quiet—crumbly, light. Two pieces in the palm. Crumbs of sugar on the sweater. Christmas looked at them and thought that a broken God's grace is still God's grace, just in two parts. Nothing was ruined. Only the shape is different.

Pretty boy.

A word came from somewhere where words wait until you call for them.

Pretty boy.

Christmas knew that was how Dominik thought of her—or used to think of her, back when he still thought of her. She knew it not because it was in his gaze. Christmas was precisely the sort of beautiful, fragile, slightly melancholic thing for Dominik to be attracted to from a safe distance.

Dominik wouldn't have put it that way. He might even have denied it, just as he occasionally denied everything, even what he felt for her.

Yet that was how he looked at her.

Being handsome is strange, one comes to believe one is irresistible.

Christmas thought about it with that peculiar analytical nature you arrive at when you have a lot of quiet mornings. Being beautiful means that people come to you for a glance. They come to see you, to stand next to you, to have you nearby like a thing that makes their presence prettier. And that is just it — it is a thing. Christmas as a thing in Dominik's proximity. Christmas as an element of the environment.

But Christmas was a man.

It sounded like a cliché, and yet it wasn't a cliché. It was specific. Christmas was a man with a specific fear—that specific fear that the closeness he longed for would never come as responsibility, but only as a glance from afar, only as a hand on his shoulder that would vanish again. He was a man with a specific desire for someone to stay—not out of dependency, not out of an inability to be alone, but out of that fundamental human wish: wanting someone to see you and then not disappear.

Heart without subtitles.

Such was Christmas's heart for all those years. He felt everything precisely, but everyone read only what suited them: the beauty, the fragility, the melancholy, not everything. Not that entire heart that labored behind it and waited and tried not to be ridiculous.

Dominik vanished quietly.

That was what Christmas couldn't explain to people who asked—or would have asked, if they asked, but Christmas didn't explain much to anyone, because explaining leads to nothing. Dominik didn't vanish. He just—gradually stopped being present. As it is with things that don't develop—they just stand still, and that is leaving.

Christmas ate the broken angel wings.

The taste of sugar on the tongue — sweet, a bit powdery, that specific taste of Christmas cookies inseparable from a December room and the light of a candle. He left the other half in his palm.

He looked at the table.

A candle. A glass of water. A bowl of angel wings. A scrap of paper.

Beside the bowl lay yet another thing — a thing that Christmas always overlooked when looking at the table. A small thing. A button. Such an ordinary button — dark blue, slightly larger than standard. It could have belonged to a jacket or a coat or anything at all. Christmas didn't know exactly where from. Either it had stayed on his floor after Dominik, or — it was from somewhere else entirely. But most likely it was Dominik's. It had been lying there for weeks, Christmas hadn't put it back into Dominik's hand because Dominik's hand was no longer there.

The button.

Christmas picked it up.

It was light, smooth on one side and with grooves on the other — a standard button, well, a bit larger, nothing special.

Christmas held it for a moment.

Then he placed it on the scrap of paper.

As a small gesture — that kind of economical and silent gesture. The button on the paper. The button as a trace of Dominik, the paper as the thing Christmas wished for.

He sat.

Prague outside the windows was waking up to its new December day — a distant tram, distant voices, distant sounds of work, just that general city hum.

Christmas was looking at the candle.

Christmas watched the little flame and in his head Dominik, height one meter eighty, a hand on his shoulder, never overnight, three sentences.

If someone else is to come, let it be someone who won't play games with me.

The third sentence.

Christmas said it slowly in his mind — like a prayer, like an incantation, like a sentence that has meaning. Like a sentence that is precise. Who won't play games with me. Who won't yearn from a safe distance. Who will see more than a pretty boy — more than fragility, more than that aesthetic melancholy.

Christmas was no longer willing to be merely aesthetic.

He had realized this slowly, through Dominik and through other things, through those quiet nights when you lie on the bed and stare at the ceiling and ask yourself: what do I actually want. And the answer is always the same and always a bit embarrassing in its simplicity: I want someone to stay.

I want someone to stay.

The candle flickered again — a little more this time, the flame shifted to the left and then returned. Christmas looked out the window. He didn't feel a draft. The flame had moved on its own. Things in rooms move without a clear cause.

He stood up.

Feet on the floor — wooden flooring, cold through his socks, that specific morning at home when the floor temperature says: we are still at the beginning of the day. He walked over to the window. He looked out.

Prague.

Roofs, chimneys, a grey sky with that backlit golden layer promising light without any guarantee. Wet tiles, a smoking chimney. The street below the roofs couldn't be seen from this angle — the window looked out at the roofs of neighboring houses and beyond them was a strip of sky and nothing more. Christmas liked this view. There was no square, no people, nothing specific that required a reaction. Just roofs and sky and air.

December air.

Christmas liked December because things took on a different light. Golden and blue, a bit magical, perhaps cheesy, but it still works, still touches him, still causes him that characteristic December feeling for which he has no precise name, but which does him good like hot cocoa.

A romantic.

Christmas was a romantic, and that was neither an insult nor an excuse. Romanticism was his temperament, not his immaturity. He saw things in a way where light on wet cobblestones is genuinely pretty, where a Christmas button on a piece of paper genuinely makes sense as a gesture, where a candle lit in the morning is genuinely different from a candle lit in the evening. That was his way of existence, and he didn't need to apologize for it.

But a romantic who doesn't know his worth is easy prey.

Christmas understood that through Dominik. He understood that his romanticism had made him willing to accept very little—to accept very little and tell himself it was poetic, to accept a hand on his shoulder and tell himself it was love, to accept presence without commitment and tell himself it was freedom. Poetic things can also be empty things with a pretty facade.

Christmas turned away from the window.

He stepped back to the table.

The candle was burning. The button lay on the scrap of paper. A bowl of angel wings. A glass of water.

Christmas reached for the button.

He took it in his palm — that weight, that smoothness, that temperature of a thing that had lain on the table and taken on room temperature. He stood with the button and looked at the candle.

Dominik was a good man.

Christmas a řekl nahlas, tichounce, jen pro pokoj.

A good man, but he couldn't stay.

And Christmas was letting him go — with a hint of bitterness. Quietly, like accepting what was, without embellishment. Dominik was present in certain ways and Christmas loves him for it. And Dominik was not present in other ways and Christmas doesn't want to live with that.

That was the whole result.

Christmas laid the button next to the bowl of angel wings.

Not on a scrap of paper — beside it. As if he had given it its own place. As if the button belonged in the altar as a witness, not as a petition. Dominik was. Christmas was. This was. And now something else.

He reached for the candle.

Fingers above the flame — not close, just so, at that distance where you feel the warmth like the presence of a witness. Christmas sat in that warmth for a moment and thought of nothing in particular, just the warmth.

Then he reached for the scrap of paper.

He took it, unfolded it.

Three sentences.

He read them — even though he knew them, even though he had written them, even though he had said them to himself so many times. To read them meant: this is real. These are the things that matter.

If Dominik returns of his own free will, I will let him come.

If he does not return, that is fine.

If someone else is to come, let it be someone who won't play games with me.

Christmas folded the slip of paper back up.

Gently — along the original folds, so the quarters matched up exactly as before. He placed it back beside the button, beside the bowl, and beside the candle.

The table was complete again.

Christmas looked at the table in silence for a moment. The room was quiet — the quiet of a place where you are alone and the room is yours and the air is yours and the candle burns for you.

Christmas order.

Christmas hadn't invented the phrase — it had just formed that way in his head, because December is the month of ordering and wishing and open hands, and so, why not. Christmas order: that scrap of paper. Three sentences. The button as a witness. Five and a half God's graces in the bowl.

The candle was burning.

Christmas got up from the table.

He went into the kitchen and put water on for tea — the kettle on the stove, the characteristic sound of it heating up. He stood by the counter and stared at the wall — not at the wall, into the wall, in that way where you look nowhere in particular and thoughts drift like a ship without a captain. The thought of Dominik drifted, too. The thought of the button drifted. The thought of the third sentence on the slip of paper drifted.

If someone else is to come.

Someone else.

Christmas didn't know what someone else would look like. He didn't want someone else to be tall or dark-haired or athletic or calm or funny or anything specific. He wanted one thing — that one thing that cannot be ordered, but is either present or not: he wanted someone to come and stay.

That was all.

To come and stay.

The kettle started whistling. Christmas took it off the heat, poured the water over a tea bag in a mug—that mug of his, rounded, dark green—and then stood with the mug in his hand by the counter, waiting for the tea to steep.

Through the kitchen window a bit of the street was visible, it also looked out at the opposite side, at the wall of the neighboring house and a piece of the pavement. The pavement was wet. A dog walked by. A man with bags walked by. A woman in a red hat walked by, quickly, with a phone to her ear.

Prague was alive.

Christmas watched her through the kitchen window and drank tea. In his head a simple silence, the silence of a thing that has settled.

He let Dominik go.

Out of a reconciliation with what had been and what had not been. Christmas let him go as if releasing the string of a kite: it would stand in the wind for a moment and then fly away elsewhere. Christmas's sky was too small for a kite like Dominik.

Perhaps love is not someone who understands immediately.

Perhaps it is someone who simply tries.

That sentence was like a gap in the room one could step into.

He finished his tea.

He returned to the room.

The candle was still burning—it always surprised him a little how long it burned. A candle has its own time. Christmas sat back down on the floor in front of the table—cross-legged, socks on the wooden floor, hands resting loosely on his knees.

He looked at the flame.

And for the first time since morning, Dominik wasn't on his mind.

Dominik simply wasn't there at that moment. There was the candle and the bowl and the button and the scrap of paper and Christmas's room and Prague outside the window, golden and December-like, and Christmas was alone.

And into that solitude entered a wish.

Someone who would stay.

Christmas closed his eyes.

He could feel the flame through his eyelids—that light, a little orange, a little gold, shining through. There was warmth in it. The small warmth of a candle, the greatest warmth a candle can give—not enough to heat a room, but enough to let a person know it is present.

Enough.

Christmas sat and Prague outside was busy with its rhythm—trams, voices, rain starting or stopping, time flowing the way December flows—and in Christmas's room there was silence and the candle and three sentences on the scrap of paper and the button beside the bowl.

A tram passed by outside.

In the distance, two or three streets away—that characteristic electric buzz, that sound of the rails. Christmas heard it and thought to himself: Prague is full of movement. Prague brings in people from elsewhere. Prague in December is a place where things happen simply because December is the time for it—full of people arriving and leaving and meeting without a plan.

The third sentence.

If someone else is to come.

Christmas opened his eyes.

The flame was burning.

Prague outside was alive.

Christmas thought to himself: Good. I let it go. I said it. I wrote it. The button is lying next to the bowl and the slip of paper is folded in quarters and the candle is burning and I am waiting for someone else.

He stood up.

He stepped closer to the candle.

He bent down—his face closer to the table, to the flame, to that small orange light. He breathed out lightly and the flame moved a little from his breath—Christmas didn't blow it out. He let it burn. He straightened up.

He walked to the wardrobe, opened it, and looked for something for today — clothes for a man who has time today and Prague is waiting behind the door. A dark blue hoodie, different from that old sweater. Jeans. Rain boots — those low, dark ones that can survive a wet pavement. Jacket — his jacket, the green one, with a little faux fur on the collar, bought at a second-hand shop in the summer for two hundred crowns.

He got dressed.

He picked up the phone from the table — it was lying next to the laptop. He unlocked it. No messages from Dominik.

A message came from a classmate from the course — Blinking? — Christmas didn't reply to it; his mind couldn't grasp any context right now other than the fact that he was here and now.

He went into the hallway.

Shoes, jacket, keys. The keys were on the hook — right where they always were. Christmas picked them up and hesitated for a moment.

He turned around.

The room was visible from the hallway — a candle was burning on the table, a small golden light in the darkness of the room, because Christmas hadn't drawn the curtain and the December light was still sleepy.

Christmas stared at her for a moment.

The candle would have burned even without him. But now he went to blow it out.

Then he opened the door and left.

The staircase. Three flights down. The courtyard and then the passageway and then the street.

Prague.

The air was cold and damp and somewhat fragrant with that breath of wet stone and distant punch stalls and tram electricity and Prague.

Christmas walked without a plan.

And that was fine.

A tram was moving down the street and Christmas stopped to let it pass—large, golden, but with Prague's patina—and watched it go. The wires above moved as it passed and then settled. The tram went its way.

Christmas kept walking.

Someone who would stay.

Prague lived its December day around him and Dominik was nowhere and that someone else was nowhere yet.

And Christmas was alone for now. But he had already blown out the candle and the scrap of paper was folded into quarters and the button lay beside the bowl of angel wings.

The Christmas order had been placed.

Somewhere in Prague, someone else was already walking their own way.

Christmas did not know.

It was enough that he had made room for him.