Dear Memory: Merry Christmas

Good morning, my dear memory, Eoin...

Whether it is mania or high spirits, I have been more or less able to maintain a streak of it this long, and I feel happy and fortunate for it, although my sleep schedule bends one way and then the other and I do wonder how much longer I can keep it up. Recently, I wake at about 4:30 in the morning, and particularly recently, I have been inclined to set to some form of productivity or another very soon after. Gradual progress is being made toward moving preparations, and on completing each of my school assignments before they come due.

Well... There was one I let slide, but it is in an easy class. I will need to cover the material on my own time anyway, I think, since I did not go to the class that gave instruction for it. I have not gone to classes Monday or Tuesday lately, because those classes are in courses that I excel at easily and my sleep schedule frequently gets all turned around on the weekend.

You are often on my mind, and sometimes I am not sure what to do with the thoughts of you. No longer driven to despair about them, for I have my plan. At the same time, I feel as though I must exhaust the variety of fancies and hopes and get tired of repeating them over and over.

Often when you come to mind, it is just the memory of your face, your hair, the soft deep sound of your voice and its mild accent. Sometimes, the way I remember you saying "shore" (as I always heard from your "sure") as you often did, open to suggestion and rarely fussy in any way. I have remembered the meal you often made of pasta with tomato sauce full of bell pepper, remembering and revisiting my happiness with your unpretentious, resourceful competence at cooking.

My fancy wanders to other happy wants. To go swimming, or skating, or to eventually learn to fly in a squirrel suit, and more.

Winter has softened for a bit, and some of the snow has melted to show patches of green. The large banks are filthy with all the accumulated dirt left behind from what has melted, to sit on top of what has not. The weather is still cool, but less cold and these past two days I have gone to school comfortably with just my t-shirt and a jacket.

I have a pupil at the college for tutoring, in the system that the college sets up to enable it. I will meet him later today, although all the details are of course confidential. This will be the first time I have actually gotten to meet a student to tutor them for pay, despite being on the register of available tutors for two years. I am happy about the occasion, although setting up the meeting through conflicting schedules has been a chore.

I begin to fear that I might run out of things to write here to you... Perhaps it is just that no particular subject has brought me here, but I thought I ought to write soon, since it's been a week and if I leave it off too long, I might forget right up until some awful pain of heartbreak reminds me. It is better to take a moment to acknowledge you, my love, though awfully far away and entirely beyond my reach by our mutual agreement, before the force of needing to do so rips it painfully out of me.

Anyway, it is clear what I should say just now. Christmas comes... I will feel myself probably to be solemnly and sadly alone for some parts the holiday. I will certainly reach out to my friends for happiness as I can. But you... You should be either with dear friends of your own or with your close family, perhaps back in Athboy and meeting your brother and the friends of your childhood. With a tear in my eye, I imagine you there, remember the house where I got to meet them. Or perhaps you might still be abroad in China, meeting with your beloved sister! I know you had plans to go meet her this winter. Above all, dear memory, I wish you and all your loved ones the very best holiday you could have, wherever you are. And for myself, I might hope that sometime this Christmas, you would spare a thought to wish me well in kind.

Merry Christmas, dear Memory, Merry Christmas and a fresh and wonderful new year. It may not be in the coming year that I set foot again in your country, but I will be taking slow steps toward it, one after the other, in the midst of every other obligation of school and home and friends. This is what I offer to you this Christmas, the only thing I can really offer you now. I hope that when at last you know of my efforts, you will be happy I made them. I hope that this Christmas, before you are likely to know any more of them than a distant and uncertain possibility, you are happy as well.