The calmest Christmas in years.

Cake, steak, a little bit of work, and some cold ass weather.

I won’t be traveling off the island. I really won’t even going anywhere beyond the office and my apartment. Tomorrow will be spent sat reading at a desk before going to the store to buy some special Japanese style Christmas cake and a sirloin.

The weekend was half an expression of immense gratitude for the pockets of community I’ve been able to find here. And the other half paying for the excesses consumed while in the company of said community.

Officially in the territory of “oh, shit. I don’t have that much time here before I’m gone.” Even with it being six/seven months, there’s a palpable finality to it. And with it a sense of questioning to how it’ll shake out.

But I think there’s always that sense of something next on the horizon for me. I try my best to sit and take a breath from time to time to enjoy where I’m at instead of bulldozing towards my next goal. I’m admittedly not great at acknowledging my own efforts— especially when I’ve managed to achieve something. It’s always been easier to push the goalposts back again and say “well, got to keep on going.”

So, as intermittent snow flurries fall (against the promise that this island never saw snow) I’ve tried to enjoy the little things. The island slang, the small warm cans of coffee from the vending machines that keep my fingers from falling off during my trudge up the hill, the random moments of beauty that stagger the soul— like the perfect circular ring of clouds surrounding the moon the other night.

It’s the passage of time— the days where I learn an awful lot about myself when I’m not doing very much at all.

It is the calmest of christmases— and I hope I don’t come across one quite like it again.

It’s not the holiday, or homesickness, or anything as such. It’s the pause in a time with no pauses— where I recognize I’m already on a road of my own choosing— but that I fear the space between the ending and new beginning. How I’ll return to something I’ve known, but that it’s not what I left. Or that I am not as I left.

So in the slow days before the turn of the year I wonder how I can best greet the changes ahead.