journal entry #4

blogmas is over and while i did hope to post 25 blog posts in 25 days i’m still happy with the 7 i got written. it’s more blog posts than i’ve published in the past year. lol

i’m sorry if this post is more melancholy than usual. a year ending isn’t all sadness but i can’t help but feel this way…

tw: depression

the last days of december close in around me, the shortness of them are suffocating. the time between christmas and new years is a countdown. each second speeding away another year of my life. if i think about the past year, the things i have done float away from me, their significance diminished by everything i have not done. uncompleted paintings and writing, disappointments and mistakes. i am not getting any younger, my youth – the golden years of my life people tell me are tarnished black.

after christmas dinner i sit on the couch, my knitting in my lap, after the last family has left. the lights on the tree reflect in my glasses and the tv drones on about a football game. there is still cleaning up to be done, and cookies to make but the silence that now fills the house is deafening. there is so much loneliness after the holidays, more than anytime of the year. i am afraid it will swallow me whole. i have had a taste of what it is like to be surrounded by people i love. darkness is even darker when the light gets turned off.

i have not been to church in months, perhaps almost been a year, but i go with my parents on christmas eve to not disappoint them, to smooth over the deep cracks that have grown. i sit in pews that are familiar to me, i grew up in this church, yet there is a foreignness now. the past is so much closer here – it grabs at me as we sing christmas carols.

you are still the same girl the past whispers. can’t you feel it?

advent candles are lit, the flames flickering to light above the wreath. the four candles of advent – hope, peace, joy and love burn through the whole service. as a child i felt the season of advent surround me in its warmth. on christmas eve, the Christ candle would be lit and we would all stand together and pass the light from candle to candle until there was a semicircle of us with small candles in our hands. the flames dancing to our breaths as we sang.

what is hope and peace and joy and love to you when you have abandoned it all? 

it is no longer mine to hold.

is this what happens when i go back to a place i grew up in but felt that i could never change? the places i felt safest turned to terror as my world fell apart. here i return to the past which will not let me go.

the last days of december are like this where the past feels the closest right now. if i close my eyes i will disappear from this moment and only return when the new year sets in.