Join the Backstreet Boys,
Brian, AJ, Howie and Nick
for a New England Christmas celebration on
December 23, 2010
at the legendary Wang Theater in historic
Boston Massachusetts.
There are a limited number of seats, so please, R.S.V.P. today at BackstreetBoys.com!
This event had Brian’s doing written all over it. I tossed the embossed white invitation down on my desk and leaned back in the chair. The Backstreet Boys had never done a Christmas anything before – not an album or a tour or an event, even. Brian had always wanted to. “It’s a magical time of the year,” he insisted, “We should share it with the fans.” But it had always been me holding us back from doing it.
Now that I was out of the band, apparently Brian had succeeded in twisting the other guys’ arms into at least doing a Christmas event. And I was, apparently, cordially invited to it.
It had been an especially long Christmas season this year. Not only was I going through my usual depressive grief that I experienced every season, but Kristen and I had been fighting almost non-stop for the past two weeks. Mason, at three and a half, was a ball of energy and she was exhausted. I was working during the day and I’d come home to find her messy haired and irritable, and it seemed like no matter what I did, I could do nothing right these days.
“Mommy’s mad at you,” Mason had sung out when I got home just a few hours ago, frustrated from a long day. Nothing had gone right for me in the past 12-hours and by the sounds it was only going to get worse. Mason giggled as he ran away and I took a deep breath.
Kristen had been sitting in the living room on a pink Victorian-style chair, her hands properly folded in front of her on her lap. I stood behind the floral-print sofa and rested my hands on it. She stared at me for a long moment. Finally I said, “I’m going to my office.”
She stiffened, “Fine.”
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked, looking at her pointedly.
Kristen’s eyebrows rose slightly, “You really want to say it that way, Kevin?” she asked.
I shrugged, “I can’t do anything to please you recently so why the hell not, at least I’d know why you’re pissed off at me for once.” I turned and scooped up the pile of mail that had come off the silver tray on a table by the stairs and stomped up them to the small man-room that I called my office. I slammed the door and sat down at the desk.
That was when I’d found the invitation.
There were some days that I wondered if leaving the Backstreet Boys had been my wisest choice. The band had been tiring me out, sure, but so was married life, so was this world that was supposedly so normal. At least when I was in BSB I had my friends around me all the time, I wasn’t constantly under pressure, Kristen understood that I was tired from working.
I sighed.
I stared at the little Christmas tree in the corner of the room. Kristen had insisted that something Christmasy go into my office, even though I hate Christmas. “You don’t hate Christmas,” she’d said when I told her this, “You grieve through it, and it hurts, but it’s Christmas… can’t you find any joy in it?”
The answer was still a resounding no. There was nothing about Christmas that made me happy anymore.
I wished things in life were different, were more secure. I wished on some levels that I’d never left BSB. I picked up the invitation. ”The door is always open for you to come back, Kevin,” I could hear AJ’s voice in my mind. ”We miss you.”
I wondered if that were still true.
