Navidad

Can I tell you that I love you…the music sounds in the background. It is Christmas Eve and for some reason it doesn’t feel like Christmas at all. Pieces of my family are not here. Important pieces of the picture that I have always created in my mental image are lacking. Some can’t ever be here anymore, while others choose not to or can’t make it. That’s the way families evolve. They grow and they start their own other families, and they sometimes stay closer, others, they fly away.

There is a part of me that wishes things would be different, yet there is also that other part that reminds me that this is the way it should be. And I am happy for those who started their own new traditions with their own families. And for the ones that are no more with us, I keep a special corner in my heart and in my mind to bring them along wherever I am. I know it’s the natural order of life, we are supposed to split and reproduce again and again like fractals.

This time I have not felt as if it was Christmas, perhaps because the weather in this place is warm, or perhaps because I cannot associate Christmas with the beach, or perhaps because the missing pieces made me feel it was not complete to celebrate. Who knows what dictates what we feel in this times of the year. 

Celebrations are always sprinkled with all kinds of emotions. Happiness, sadness, anticipation, disappointment…it’s all there to get mixed together, to spark in any given moment to colored the memory we will form in our minds.

Later we will composed a different picture, with all the good parts that we liked, modified perhaps a little, perhaps a lot, omitting the things that did not go our way, because in the end, our hearts and our brains will like to only keep the good portions of it all.

So happy Christmas says my heart, and I take that mental picture. 

Food is delicious, company is good, music plays outside, and games are played to close the night.

It doesn’t matter how we feel really, it matters that we are together to celebrate and the warmth of the hearts is captured.

Feliz navidad