A tall, skinny guy with curly hair down his back comes around from the side of the house, an axe slung over his shoulder. He’s wearing a green elf hat.

“Hey, man!” I can hear Adam say. The guy puts his arm around Adam and they hug, bumping shoulders and shaking hands at the same time. Adam slaps some cash into the guy’s hand, and the guy passes his axe to Adam. They walk to the far end of the porch and the guy points to the field of trees on the side of the house. Adam nods. They shake hands again.

Adam gets back in the car, resting the axe carefully on the back seat. “Okay. Billy says the trees on the far end of the lot are the best.”

“I like his hat,” I say.

Adam laughs. He drives us further down the bumpy dirt road until we can’t see the farmhouse anymore and it’s just me and him and this miniature forest, like we’re in a fairy tale. It’s starting to snow, even though there are hardly any clouds. We walk around, holding hands, looking at trees from every angle as if we’re making the most important of decisions.

When my teeth start to chatter, Adam takes his hat off and drops it on my head. “You can wait in the car if you want,” he says.

“No, I’m fine.”

He kisses me, and then we decide that the tree we’re kissing in front of should be our tree, even though it’s a little sparse on one side.

“Are you sure?” Adam says.

I nod. “It’s part of our history now.”

Adam walks to the car and comes back with the axe. It’s that time of night just before it gets dark when the light is orange, and everything looks brighter, and seeing him chopping at our Christmas tree, looking golden, his breath forming clouds, makes me wish I took pictures or painted or had some way of keeping all of this in my mind exactly as it is so I’ll never forget.

When we get home, Adam cuts the rope on the car and we haul the tree up the stairs together. It’s heavy and we’re clumsy and the needles scratch my hands, but it smells like a whole entire forest right in our stairwell. We get to the top of the stairs and then realize we should have unlocked the door to the apartment first. Adam put the keys back in his pocket after he unlocked the downstairs door.

“You got it for a sec?” Adam asks.

“Sure,” I say. He lets go to dig for the keys. The tree is too heavy. My hands slip and it slides down the stairs until the trunk hits the wall with a thud.

“Shit,” I say.