On the first night of Hanukkah, I eat Indian food in the East Village with three friends from graduate school at 6:30 p.m. after breakfast with Amy in Philadelphia at 8:30 a.m., brunch with Shaun and his boyfriend at 11:00, a 1:15 p.m. bus back to New York, a long walk down Canal Street with all of my baggage, a cab ride to the East Village, milkshakes with Carlos, and a walk through the park. I get home just before midnight, where there had been a Hanukkah celebration hours before. I don’t bother to ask if they lit the candles. I go to bed without the flames flickering in the darkness – one of my favorite Jewish traditions.

On the second night I have dinner with Laurie at a macrobiotic restaurant after brunch with Phil where he tells me about last night’s date, and we giggle like school children, and he helps me pick out a holiday party gift at a tea shop, and helps me wrap it on the sidewalk, and I jump in a cab to a the holiday party on the Lower East Side, and realize I forgot the liter bottles of soda I promised to bring, and I stop at the bodega, and I walk into the holiday party, and I rush in a cab up to dinner with Laurie after which she drops me off at Penn Station in the pouring rain and I head back to Long Island just before midnight and forget about the candles.

On the third night, my mother calls me while I’m on the train. I ignore the call in order to call my partner in London. He doesn’t pick up. I call my mother back. She’s waiting to talk to her best friend in Los Angeles. Says she called to see if I wanted to light the Hanukkah candles over the phone with her and my sister at college or should they just do it without me. I say I haven’t lit the candles the entire holiday. I have to be somewhere in ten minutes. May as well just go ahead without me.

Just seems silly to even put the effort in – at this point – what with Jonathan overseas for a three-month photography fellowship. Grandson of Holocaust survivors, son of a yeshiva-educated dentist without an ounce of Hebrew in his breath. For three Hanukkahs he stood by my side. Smiled as I sang the prayers and lit the candles. Said it felt special. Wrote me the most beautiful card about all of it – the candles, the flames, glistening in the dead of darkness.

This year, Hanukkah is a bust.

On the fourth night, I don’t even try. I force myself to compete in a poetry slam just to help out a friend after three doctors appointments, two meetings, and several train rides.

Growing up, Hanukkah was all about presents – the rainbow-colored sleeping bag my aunt and uncle gave my cousin Tracy and me that nurtured my childhood and every sleepover where I filled someone’s hand with shaving cream and tickled their face. As an adolescent, Hanukkah was about protest. About: Mom, stop giving us presents because that’s what Christians do and Hanukkah isn’t Christmas and this is just sacrilegious and self-righteous self-righteous insert self righteous 16-year-old quip here. In college it was about finals and crashing after finals and winter break and no time for holidays, I’m a self-important Ivy League student in Philadelphia and who has time for anything else but…

The fifth night. I bail on an event for which I’d already bought a ticket in order to report for an article I’m writing about plastic surgery and body image. One of my sources changes her interview time. The deadline is two days away. I only have tomorrow to write the several thousand-word story. I take the subway to East New York while I shove my dinner – a salad – into my mouth until I accidentally drop the fork on the subway floor.

All I want to do is sleep. All I want to do is be grateful for having so much to do but my body is telling me to find some light in all the darkness, all the all the all the darkness.

On the sixth night, I have dinner with my best friend and my mother.

Years ago my friend Jack, now a Rabbi, told me Hanukkah is a light in the midst of darkness. The darkness of winter. The winter of doubt. The doubt of warmth. The warmth of hope. The hope that there is always a light. That the light, ever quiet ever subtle at even its most faint. Is always the possibility of explosion. Of incredible. Of ignite.

On the seventh night, I am exhausted. That morning I impulse purchased a $141 Amtrak ticket 20 minutes before my otherwise free bus ride to Washington, D.C. because I didn’t finish the story. I needed to finish the story. I needed to be on the train in order to finish the story. I burn blank CDs for a friend’s bachelorette party in Union Station. Take a business call while sitting on my suitcase outside the Papyrus Store. Shove a Jamba Juice smoothie down my throat and call it lunch. Jump in a cab to Bethesda, Maryland, with Jenna and we get to the bachelorette party rental house before everyone else.

She observes Shabbat. And when the sun starts tapering through the windows we head to the kitchen. And I tell her I haven’t lit the candles all week. That it’s one of my favorite things to do in Judaism and maybe because Jonathan’s gone, maybe that’s why I just, I just, I just had too much else going on but all I ever wanted to do was see the light in all the darkness and she tells me to light the candles and I feel like I’m going to cry because all I ever wanted to do was see the light in all of the darkness, in the dead of winter, in the dead of exhaustion.

On the eighth night, I’ve finished my story. Turned it in to the editor, and started enjoying the other women amongst whom I am surrounded. I tell myself I’ll do better next year. Find the light in all the darkness but I know that my body is begging me to slow down. Begging me to find an answer before next winter. Begging me to find the flicker in the simmering overwhelm that is my life. Begging me to remember that the Maccabees found a drop of oil in the destroyed temple and it burned for eight nights. Begging me to remember that my body was once a destroyed temple and it is still standing, but oh, how it wants to feel the light year round. How it wants to lift into spring and relish in the sunrise, how it wants to feel itself breathe.

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