The Twelve Days of Solitude

I am back in Dyersburg and I have not seen anyone yet. The day after I drove in, my mother began the process of moving all her possessions across town to a smaller, more manageable house.
Today we are still surrounded by cardboard boxes, and eating off styrafoam--maintence people stop by everyday to fiddle with the water heater or the electricity. My two brothers are in Florida with my father for Christmas, and my mother has to work full days this entire week, so I am spending a lot of time alone in this unfamiliar house. At least I get a chance to read. I didn't do too much of that last break because I was spending so much time with friends, so now that I have all this alone time, I am finally remembering how to lose myself completely in books.

Christmas was yesterday. I have never spent Christmas alone before. No presents under the tree, no laughing children, not even a warm meal, just boxes and boxes of old photographs and bed linens. I don't blame anyone; my mother has been going through a lot of stress lately and it's been almost all I can do to keep her from bursting into tears at times (the divorce and all). So on Christmas morning, I decided to paint a picture. I cut up some of the cardboard we had stuck in the garage, and unpacked all my paint supplies I had brought with me from Nashville. I spent about eight hours out in the garage, and I was pretty proud of the result. It's a single tree facing twilight at the dawn of a snow storm.

It made my day just wonderful, it really did. All that joy I was hoping to get from familial warmth I found in the act of creation and the intricies of nature. I usually go into "Everything is Beautiful" mode around full moons, and the one on the 23rd felt so intense I thought I would explode with joy, despite everything. I have been taking hour-long night walks ever since I got back in town--Nashville makes me miss the outdoors so much--and it just makes everything okay. How you can you be sad when there are molecues and electrons, stars and galaxies swirling all round you? There is so much love in the air around Christmastime.

So today I'm going to read another XKCD webcomic, microwave myself a paper cup of soy milk and read the last fifty pages of _One Hundred Years of Solitude_. This probably should have been the saddest Christmas ever, but it wasn't. It's actually been one of my favorites.