(no subject)
The Turn of the Year
Sam doesn’t mark his year beginning on New Year’s Day. And, unlike most of his friends, he doesn’t think of the year as moving from the commencement of the school year in the fall until the beginning of the summer holidays either.
Even before he began to understand why-and fuck if that didn’t take pretty much his entire life, no help from Dad or Dean, and bitter isn’t really the right word for that, more like numb-Sam has always felt some kind of odd affinity for the winged lions of Babylon, he’d dreamt of blue enamel-work, and knew without experiencing it exactly what myrrh smelled and tasted like.
As a young boy, Sam watched Dad’s reflexive Christianity fade into practical cause-and-effect. Gone was church on Easter and Christmas that Dean had told Sam about in an off-handed way, focusing more on post-Church cookies and hot chocolate, Easter eggs and jelly beans, than liturgy. Sam learned about corporeal resurrection in a graveyard in Columbia, South Carolina, about crucifixion from A&E. Sam grew up understanding that religion was a tool, a tool to fight off the very real things glowering in the darkness with claws and diaphanous bodies that bullets couldn’t ever rend.
Sam dreamed of gold leaf and clotting blood on the edges of intricately carved blades. He learned very young that some words were held down in your belly like the bile that wants to explode out over the sight of entrails or the horror of infinity. Sam learned that Dean was scared for him easily and believed anything Sam told him, believed too hard and fixedly when Sam said “The things with no names are lonely.” Dad had no use for anything without real-world application, and Sam understood that-it pissed him off, but he understood it.
When he was about eleven, Sam began celebrating Nawruz in his mind. He had no real way to do more than that, but on the vernal equinox he closed his eyes and greeted the new year. He imagined a flame in his mind. He made the flame blue and white and pictured it burning up the darkness of the year before. The next year after that he managed to slip a quarter each into Dad and Dean’s pockets as tokens of money gifted for luck and lit a candle in the closet when Dad went out to reconnoiter and Dean went out for food. By the time Sam moved in with Jess, his rituals were engrained; when she asked him why he lit his lamps and threw out a set of clothes symbolically, he told her his mother had been Muslim and that seemed enough for her.
Sam watches Dean drinking Baby Duck on New Year’s Eve the year Dad died-sacrificed himself like some demigod out of the oldest stories-and he feels no closure, no impending change, because the current calendar means nothing to him, just numbers sitting on top of other numbers, a counting system that’s arbitrary and not based on any kind of underlining reality, something constructed for ease of use for banks and business.
Dean drinks from the bottle and watches the animated skeleton that was once Dick Clark with his neutral face. “The equinoxes are totally better for the start and end of the year, man, this shit’s bogus.”
Sam watches the side of Dean’s face and wonders if Dean’s saying more than what his words mean. They’ve gotten to a place where he can’t always tell anymore. “Open doors to the other stuff, you know?” Dean must be drunker than Sam thought. “Light a candle instead of cursing the darkness.”
Sam picks up the bottle of Jim Beam sitting on the bedstand next to him and flips his bangs down over his eyes with a flick of his chin. “Yeah, man. I know.”
*
Eta: Dedicated to J who fills the world full of good food and sparkles and also loves the beauty that is difference as much as me.