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| | | A single, flickering note in the soul of a homeless man on Christmas Eve gathers a community out of darkness and into light. |
| | Snow fell softly over the city on Christmas Eve, drifting through the glow of streetlamps and settling on bundled families hurrying from shop to shop. Children tugged with mittened hands, faces upturned to catch flakes on their tongues. Store windows shimmered with ribbons and warm light, each display stacked high with last-minute hopes. There was a pleasant hum to it all, the kind of cheerful rush that made the whole evening feel like a snow globe someone had shaken just enough.
And yet, underneath the laughter and bright wrapping paper, a question lingered in a place words rarely reached. It lived quietly in those who had seen many Christmases come and go, in those who had learned how quickly the glow of the day gave way to the gray of the ordinary. It flickered in the pause between songs on the radio, in the brief silence when a door closed behind a family at the end of their errands.
Is there more than this?
Not less, not a rejection of the joy and the gifts and the meals, but something deeper, something the lights seemed to point toward but never quite touch.
The snow kept falling, as if listening.
Just beyond the bright streets and their chattering crowds, where the festive music thinned into echoes and the storefronts gave way to old brick, a man sat hunched on a metal grate. Steam rose from beneath him, pale and restless, curling into the cold air like breath drawn from the depths of the city itself. He leaned in, as if trying to make himself small enough to disappear. A worn poster drooped above his head, its edges curling away from a graffiti-stained wall. The message, half-covered by other notices, still read clearly enough:
“DUE TO FIRE, CHRISTMAS SERVICES WILL BE HELD IN THE OLD KOHLER BUILDING.”
The man barely saw it. His world had narrowed to the thin coat wrapped around his shoulders, the ache in his bones, the slow rhythm of breath forming small clouds in the cold air. The city flowed around him, its motion and meaning passing as distant as a song in a distant room.
The true cold inside him had taken longer to settle. It had arrived not all at once but over years — disappointments gathering like snow on a bare branch, choices that seemed small at the time but became chains, faces that once knew his name now turned to other concerns. Somewhere along the way, he had lost track of when he stopped expecting anything different. Nights like this made the idea of giving in seem almost gentle. A man could lean back, close his eyes, let the snow cover him, and the world would go on without a ripple.
He knew that. He believed it. He had made peace with it more than once.
Yet tonight, in the still space where surrender usually settled, something else moved.
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