The Loneliest Time of the Year: On the Memories That Chase You During the Holiday Season

The clam never celebrated holidays before she got married. Her parents had worked through all of them—Thanksgiving, Christmas, even Chinese New Year—so when she went to college, she did the same. She was a bakery girl, and always took the holiday shifts for overtime pay. She’d watch the parking lot empty, pack up the unsold panettone, then go home and eat an entire cake on her own. After her marriage, however, holidays became big affairs that required travel and planning. These were holidays as celebrated in the movies, with stockings and decorations and board games by the fire. She thought it was incredible that these rituals weren’t made up. As she was feeling such attendant pressure to insert herself correctly into the scene, her cheeks would be sore by the end of the holiday from all the aggressive smiling.

This year, newly liberated from her husband’s family obligations, the clam had nowhere to be on Thanksgiving. This should have been a relief, but the omnipresent holiday decor assaulted her senses. The smell of cinnamon repulsed her, as did the sight of falling leaves, cornucopias, turkeys, cobwebs, ghosts, and that stupid cursive that had become the font of choice for selling pumpkin lattes and a vague notion of cozy well-being. The American holiday cycle was such a sick aberration, she thought. Autumn was supposed to be a winding down of the year, when animals prepared to go into hibernation, not this frenetic jetting to and fro between forced celebrations and hysterical, high-pitched shopping. The pressure to couple up was intense, the expectation to be somewhere intimated each time someone asked, Where will you be going for the holidays? Was this the onus behind cuffing season? Settle for any body. No one wanted to endure the holidays alone if they could help it.

“Does that mean you’ll do a Friendsgiving then?” her loft-mate Anton ventured one day while they were washing up their dishes at the sink. They had both walked out of their rooms at the same moment with their dirty dishes, their intention regretfully obvious. Now it was an awkward dance of yielding and waiting with dripping soap hands while the other finished rinsing. Decidedly not a picture of domestic bliss. Although Anton remained her favorite roommate because he, too, kept rigid hours of monastic discipline and always did his dishes. He was the only one they ever saw sprinting down the hall with the gigantic bag of dripping garbage. Everyone else just stuffed and stuffed, blithely certain that someone else would take care of it.

Was Anton her soulmate? Look at those nimble, sturdy hands, foaming and lathering! Perhaps her heartbreak occurred only to clear the way for this man, Anton the monk.

“Are you going to a Friendsgiving then, now that you don’t have any family obligations?” Anton repeated.

“I don’t know…” she said in a noncommittal way, in case he wanted to invite her somewhere. “I wasn’t planning to, but I’m open to suggestions…!”

She had mewled this last part in a bizarre singsong voice. She got chills when she heard that coming out. “Sorry, I think my voice cracked there? I haven’t spoken to anyone all day!” she announced. “No, I’m unaccounted for. What about you?”

“Me, I’m going to New Jersey with my girlfriend!” he chirped.

So—Anton had a girlfriend. Why didn’t she know that? The world was dizzying with its injustice.

“Mm. That sounds nice,” she said. “Actually, my best friends are in Paris. I’ll probably go see them.”

“Paris! That’s amazing. I’ve always wanted to go. My brother says it’s magical.”

“Oh, I treat Paris like it’s another crappy borough of Brooklyn. It’s really nothing special. Not like going to New Jersey.”

The clam ran back to her room and slammed the door. I will never eat again so I will never do dishes again so I will never see Anton again, she thought. I will never leave this room. Jesus, why the hell did I have to say that?

*

Open the browser. JFK to CDG. Mike and Shelma told her she was always welcome to visit them in Paris whenever. I’m being so brave and spontaneous, she thought. I’m going to buy this ticket without asking permission. She flinched upon seeing the ticket price, then charged it all to a credit card. She reviewed the receipt. Nine days. She couldn’t believe it. The dread rolled in.

*

Immediately upon landing, she knew Paris was the wrong city to flee to. As she dragged her rolling suitcase down the cobbled boulevards, she realized she’d been to this city so many times with her husband that their memories had accreted into the landscape. Each time she looked up, she saw something that triggered involuntary recall. There was Chez Prune, along the Canal Saint-Martin, where they had once dined. That art bookstore. That cheese shop next to the produce stall next to the laundromat. Every green bench was one they could have sat upon, every cooing pigeon one she could have once stopped to admire.

She wove her way through a marché aux puces in the Marais, willfully ignoring the objects he would have once expressed interest in. This ornamented paper clip, that lion head bookend. The clothes that would have appealed to him, or probably would appeal to him still. She tried to extricate herself from the meandering masses. Everyone was so happy. Couples linked by the elbows, young people crouching over to inspect glasses so old they’d become new again. The flea market, she realized, was where you went to consume the material remains of the dead, all their watches and clothes and furniture. She never before thought of the longevity of clothes. The way a coat lived on and on. Even my clothes will outlive me, she thought abruptly, recalling how the last time she was here in Paris, she had worn the same exact clothes. You think you’re doing something innocent by collecting staples in your closet, but soon these clothes solidify into a style and that’s it. Your sartorial life is a one-way thing and now you can’t change.

Every decision you make has a lasting consequence, think about that, she thought as she walked down the narrow alleys shadowed by stark rows of Haussmann-era buildings, toward Mike’s flat. These buildings were made of Lutetian limestone, the stone that built Paris, quarried right here since Roman times. Limestone was a sedimentary rock, composed of the calcium remains of mollusks, corals, and microscopic creatures that had lived and died in this formerly shallow sea. The white stone was a memorial. She ran a hand along the cool surface, some parts smooth, other parts rough and pocked. At least forty million years of sedimentation and pressure created this stone. Excised from the subterranean depths and lifted up to the surface, Paris forced you to look all this memory in the eye, at street level. That was why she couldn’t stop remembering.

Bring too much memory up to the surface and collapse becomes imminent. She knew that after centuries of quarrying in place, Paris was barely supported underneath. Hundreds of miles of manmade tunnels, many poorly buttressed, had collapsed and swallowed entire city blocks. The metro stop at Denfert-Rochereau, for instance, near the Barrière d’Enfer, or Gate of Hell, was one such collapse site.

One unassuming day in the late eighteenth century, horse carriages, pedestrians, an entire apartment building, were swallowed whole. The city’s extensive labyrinth of catacombs was nearby as well, underground ossuaries crammed full of the skeletal remains of millions of Parisians. Their bones were stacked in an incredible density down below. Couldn’t these bones eventually morph into a kind of limestone? the clam wondered. All these lives, once singular, reincorporated through time into a single consolidated mass. She would be in this limestone too.

Her only recourse was to keep moving. She could plaster over her past memories with this new memory in which the territory belonged to her alone. Her past memories would be buried with this newer, fresher memory, or at least made more faint, even if, in this new memory, she was crying. But even this scene—woman, clam, crying—happened so many times in Paris, in real life and in the movies, that it, too, was part of the city, part of what made Paris so distinctly itself.

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Adapted from Clam Down: A Metamorphosis by Anelise Chen. Copyright © 2025 by Anelise Chen. Published by One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.