“I don’t believe you.”

Langston sat up so I could see his face. Even sick, he was pathetically sincere. “Believe me.”

“How come no one told me?”

“They were trying to protect you. Not cause you concern until they knew for sure these things would happen.” This was how Shrilly was born, from people trying so hard to “protect” me.

“PROTECT THIS!” I shouted, lifting my middle finger to Langston.

“Shrilly!” he admonished. “That’s so unlike you.”

“What is like me?” I asked.

I stormed away from the garden rooftop, snarled at poor ol’ Grunt, who was licking his paws after breakfast, and continued my storming, to downstairs, to my apartment, to my room, in my city, Manhat an. “No one’s moving me to Fiji,” I mut ered as I got dressed to go out.

I couldn’t think about this Christmas catastrophe. I just couldn’t. It was too much.

I felt especially grateful now having the red Moleskine to con de in. Just knowing a Snarl was on the other side to read it—to possibly care—inspired my pen to move quickly in answer to his question. As I waited for the subway en route to Snarl’s Midtown destination, I had plenty of free time on the bench at the Astor Place station, since the notoriously slow 6 train seemed to take its usual forever to arrive.

I wrote:

What I want for Christmas is to believe.

I want to believe that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, there is reason to hope. I write this while a homeless man is sleeping on the ground under a dirty blanket a few feet away from the bench where I’m sit ing at the Astor Place subway stop, on the uptown side, where I can see across the tracks to the Kmart entrance on the downtown side. Is this relevant? Not really, except that when I started to write this to you, I noticed him, then stopped writing long enough to dash over to the Kmart to buy the man a bag of “fun size” Snickers bars, which I slipped underneath his blanket, and that made me extra sad because his shoes are all worn out and he’s dirty and smelly and I don’t think that bag of Snickers is going to make much di erence to this guy, ultimately. His problems are way bigger than a bag of Snickers can resolve.

I don’t understand how to process this stu sometimes. Like, here in New York, we see so much grandeur and glitz, especially this time of year, and yet we see so much su ering, too. Everyone else on the platform here is just ignoring this guy, like he doesn’t exist, and I don’t know how that’s possible. I want to believe it’s not crazy of me to hope he will wake up and a social worker will take him to a shelter for a warm shower, meal, and bed, and the social worker will then help him nd a job and an apartment and … See? It’s just too much to process. All this hoping for something—or someone—that’s maybe hopeless.

I’m having a hard time processing what I am supposed to believe, or if I’m even supposed to. There is too much information, and I don’t like a lot of it.

And yet, for some reason that all scienti c evidence really should make impossible, I feel like I really do hope. I hope that global warming will go away. I hope that people won’t be homeless. I hope that suf ering will not exist. I want to believe that my hope is not in vain.

I want to believe that even though I hope for things that are so magnanimous (good OED word, huh?), I am not a bad person because what I really want to believe in is purely selfish.

I want to believe there is a somebody out there just for me. I want to believe that I exist to be there for that somebody.

Remember in Franny and Zooey (which I assume you’ve read and loved, considering the location where you found the Moleskine in the Strand) how Franny was this girl from the 1950s who freaked out over what’s the meaning of life because she thought it was embedded in a prayer someone told her about? And even though neither her brother Zooey nor her mom understood what Franny was going through, I think I really did. Because I would like the meaning of life explained to me in a prayer, and I would probably ip out, too, if I thought the possibility of at aining this prayer existed, but was out of my reach of understanding. (Especially if being Franny meant I’d also get to wear lovely vintage clothes, although I’m dubious on whether I’d want the Yale boyfriend named Lane who’s possibly a bit of a prick but people admire me for going out with him; I think I’d rather be with someone more … er … arcane.) At the end of the book, when Zooey calls Franny pretending to be their brother Buddy, trying to cheer her up, there’s a line where he talks about Franny going to the phone and becoming “younger with each step” as she walked, because she’s making it to the other side. She’s going to be okay. At least that’s what I took it to mean.

I want that. The get ing younger with each step, because of anticipation, in hope and belief.

Prayer or not, I want to believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, it is possible for anyone to nd that one special person. That person to spend Christmas with or grow old with or just take a nice silly walk in Central Park with. Somebody who wouldn’t judge another for the prepositions they dangle, or their run-on sentences, and who in turn wouldn’t be judged for the snobbery of their language etymology inclinations. (Gotcha with the word choices, right? I know, sometimes I surprise even myself.) Belief. That’s what I want for Christmas. Look it up. Maybe there’s more meaning there than I understand. Maybe you could explain it to me?

I had continued writing in the notebook when the train came, and nished my entry just as it arrived at Fifty-ninth and Lex. As the zill ions of people, along with me, poured out of the train and up into Bloomingdale’s or the street, I concentrated hard on not thinking about what I was determined not to think about.