The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily

by Rachel Cohn

She was enough to turn me a little cynical about my own cynicism.

They were confused by how their dark cloud of a son could have brought home such a sunbeam.

They were, in fact, a little in awe, to a degree that New Yorkers usually reserve for the perfect bagel, a fifty-block cab ride with no red light, and the one movie out of every five that Woody Allen aces.

My mental furnace was built for immolation, not warmth.

I was discovering that no matter how many YouTube videos you watch, there is no way to knit a red sweater in a single afternoon.

He lived because she helped him live, and that helping took its toll.

she’s the one I’d want to be the one to help me walk again. She’s the one I’d want to lead me back into life.

It’s always the ones who believe who are hurt the most when things go wrong.

There’d been no room in my toy-soldier heart for Lily, but she’d forced herself in anyway. And she’d brought Christmas with her.

The reason Lily wore it well was because she wore her kindness all year round.

I saw pieces of Lily everywhere now.

Langston didn’t want to like the idea, because it would mean liking me, at least for a minute.

“I don’t want your filthy lucre!” I exclaimed. Perhaps too loudly for a restaurant of such quotidian pain.

then employed a sentence that has been the coin and currency of New York since the days of yore: “I know a guy.”

It was nearly impossible for New Yorkers to get to trees, so every December, the trees came to the New Yorkers.

He also thought Christmas trees could be replanted once Christmas was over. That was a hard conversation to have.

This was, in my mind, like taking the most expensive, finest cheese in the world and then melting it on a burger. I loved them both, in different ways, and seeing them together made my head hurt.

the part of the relationship where the moon waxes and wanes.

“Oh! Like Chris Pine playing a tree! That would be cool. He’s already so wooden! But not in a bad way!”

(The store was called Christmas Memories, which was enough to make me want to drink Pop Rocks with Coke. I had to think of it as Christmas Mammaries in order to go inside.)

“I get it,” Langston said. Meanwhile, Boomer guffawed. He hadn’t gotten it.

So he sat down. For her.

this year what I wanted most this season was for Lily to be happy again.

There is no better precursor to Christmas than a quality goose bump chill.

Brusque. It was such a Dash word – obscure, unknowable, distant – that it felt strange I even knew it.

If Lily was the subject on Jeopardy!, the answer would be, “She does not understand it at all,” and the question would be, “What is the human male species?”

Who else but Dash would delight in a Christmas decoration displaying the face of a celebrated literary serial killer and give it to his girlfriend as a present?

That was my entry into sadness, stage one.

Grandpa lived, but a piece of me felt like it died that day, for having the joy of realizing I truly loved somebody so quickly deflated by experiencing the feeling alone.

and I know he likes me. A lot. Sometimes I wish he wouldn’t seem so surprised about that.

Pigeons are not cute. They’re nuisances.

I knew that if you put Lily into the most elaborate X-ray machine ever devised, and if you scoured the resulting X-ray with the most powerful microscope available in all the universe, you wouldn’t find a single bad intention in any bone in her body.

Langston used this pause to say “I have to go see a man about a reindeer” and bolt to another room.

I knew she didn’t suffer fools gladly, but she’d gladly make a fool suffer.

“Oh – and you’re rakish as well! I’ve often found it helpful to have a shovel around when you’re dealing with a rake.”

“I didn’t have to be here, you know,” he mumbled. I almost felt sorry for him. But not quite. “That reflects well on you,” Mrs Basil E. conceded. “Now don’t alter that reflection with further speech. Let’s sit and watch the others.”

I’ll wear it with pride. Dash-and-Lily pride.”

It might be all the coaxing that’s holding me back from getting there. These feelings have to happen organically. Forced gaiety is the worst. I need sincerity to feel the season.

I know I am an overprotected, coddled bird, but I’d like to evolve past that. I mean, not to the extent that I don’t get generous birthday cash, but a certain amount of independence would be healthy.

always made it my mission to like him, because somebody has to like the people no one else likes or the world would just be hopeless.

And the best way to extract holiday cheer, I’ve found, is to spend some time with the most curmudgeonly person you know, and their grump can’t help but force you into feeling good, because it gives you perspective and balance.

These tender memories are; – a fairy tale Of some enchanted land we know not where, But lovely as a landscape in a dream.

Thinking is your favorite thing to do, isn’t it? Sometimes it’s endearing, but sometimes it’s completely exhausting.”

She was the person I wanted to share life with the most, and it was the moments of noticing that made me feel this most acutely.

“We always torch the ones we love –” “– the ones we shouldn’t torch at all.”

“Is that a family trait? Disappearing?” Now he turned back to me. “Yes. But you have to understand – Lily’s not like the rest of us. Lily’s the best we’ve got.”

“Of course I love him. And I might even love him enough to stop being so afraid of it. That’s what we have to find out.

to be the continuity for each other even when everything else is discontinuous or fickle or cruel.

I know in my heart that I can live without him and I know in my heart that I don’t want to – that’s a...

I try to be a bright spot. And sometimes with the two of us, it is bright. But a lot of the time, I’m just a spot. It all feels so big, and I’m just a spot.”