So I guess this is Christmas. Here, from the lower deck overlooking the cactus and the sand, I can hear the ocean slump her shoulders into the beach with an exhausted sigh. It feels like home, here - strange at that is to admit. I suppose some small part of me found comfort here, a little slice of something warm amidst all this light and sound. I’m not certain what this means, or whether it something to be celebrated or rather to be lamented. They say home is where the heart is - I wish I knew where mine best belonged. 
I think I found in silence greater answers than words could ever have granted. And, I suppose, it’s fitting really - another empty romance characterized more by stillness than by sound - I know better than to mourn the loss of someone that I never truly possessed.
This town is haunted, you know. I long ago made the mistake of bringing love here, of walking these cobble streets and tracing the darkened hill roads with my heart high in my chest and my hand held warm by another. The long way home, the quiet winding path, furthest from town and thus blessed by solitude - I still can’t bring myself to walk it again. I think, maybe, I would have walked it with you. Perhaps I only dreamed such, perhaps my foolish heart wished it would be so. But for now, I’ll keep clear. The ghosts have it now, the spectres of memory and horrors of false hope - remnants of my onetime ruin. I try so hard to remember. I hope so hard to forget.
I’m missing the point, I know. Don’t get me wrong - I am happy to be here, among family and friends. There will come a time that this space is not quite so palpable, that this distance somehow not so far.