Absence.

My brother managed to make it down from spending time with his friends in Evanston to spend Christmas with us. I was reminded yet again of how oddly I react when reuniting with people. I am rather unfamiliar with the concept of constantly missing someone. I have moments when I feel their absence sharply and want nothing more than to share whatever I'm experiencing right then with them, but generally I am caught up in my immediate surroundings. Goodbyes are hard for me, painful even. I don't handle goodbyes well. Even if I know they'll only be for a little while, I grieve deeply and often cry. However, I soon recover. Hellos are quite different. Given the depth of my partings, I would expect my reunions to be more exuberant, but the best word I can come up with to describe them is mundane. Instead of making a big deal of my reunions, it's almost like something inside me nods and goes about it average life, and I go about doing my common, everyday things. It's like I feel that whoever it is is there now and life can go on as normal with no theatrics and no big production. They just get folded back into the normal as though they never left. I always fear that this may seem heartless and unfeeling to some, but it just feels to me that those people I have such trouble saying goodbye to have their own, unique places in my heart that they will always fit back into easily. It's like a jigsaw puzzle. Some pieces put up a fight when you try to separate them, the interlocking sides getting all twisted together and requiring no small bit of effort to wiggle them apart. But when you put the same two pieces back together, they neatly interlock and lie quietly, taking no more than a second to settle serenely into the way things should be.

Happy Christmas to all, especially those pieces I'm missing right now.

Listening to: TSO's interpretation of "Carol of the Bells"
Reading: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith