A Snowflake Wish

Walking by my favorite picture of me sitting on my Nana Edna’s lap, I turn and do a second take at the photo.
I know exactly what it looks like because it’s on the dresser in my bedroom, a place a walk past thousands of times a day, but I could have sworn, just now, that old biddy had been sporting a smirk I hadn’t seen before.
Brushing my insane thoughts aside—pictures can’t change themselves—I reach for my carryall and sigh in relief.
I don’t remember the last time I took a vacation.
There wasn’t money for spring breaks in college where I was a pre-med student living off Ramen and frozen pizza, my ass will never forgive me for. Then, I went right into grad school where I piled up more debt while others took a gap year to backpack around the world. With an above average MCAT score, four years of medical school followed, then lead to another four in a residency program in psychiatry.
So, I became a full-fledged psychiatrist by the time I was thirty-two. Two years later, my private practice is flourishing, while my love life is non-existent at best. At worst, it’s a train wreck of one failed relationship after another.
I’m a serial dater who knows better than to make the mistakes I have in my love life. But here I am, alone and still making them while spending more time in my office than doing anything about it. I just can’t seem to make a love connection like the ones that I counsel my patients are so important for a relationship to work.
I need a man I feel an instant connection with. One I can’t explain why, but his scent alone, one only I’m attuned to, drives me wild. A man who finishes my sentences when I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. Someone who just gets me and accepts all my quirks and habits and everything in between.
I may have paid off some of my debt over the years, but now time was holding me from enjoying life. My horrendous taste in men and just pure bad luck from the looks of it, was keeping me single and feeling lonely, like I’m missing out on the life I was destined to have.
Not to mention, I’m a people pleasing empath and my patients keep having problems and I keep pushing off the self-care I preach.
But no more.
Jeffery, my favorite patient, helped me see the light.
He’s a kind man around my age who is as unlucky in love as I am.
I wish I felt that connection with him, because at this point, I’d be willing to ignore the fact he’s my patient and dating him would be wrong.
But, today is the day I finally take the magical trip Nana Edna, and I made up when I was a child.
Coming from a single-child family with parents who didn’t see holidays as magical events, Nana and I created our own make-believe ones.
Nana was always coming up with some magical story or another, but her Christmas one was by far my favorite. I waited all year long for her to brush that story off and start rattling off new details each year until I was so invested, it was all I could think about all year and winter quickly became my favorite time of year.
So, imagine my surprise, a few weeks ago when my inbox had an ad for Christmas Land. It advertised everything I imagined as a child when Nana Edna would tell me bedtime stories.
I had to stop my hand from reaching for my phone to call her. Nana Edna died five years ago. Some days, it still feels like yesterday.