I don’t forget. I won’t ever forget. These are the rings of my tree, the marks made as I grew, the lines left as plain and permanent reminder of the wind and the weather this oaken heart of mine has seen and survived. I don’t always walk the line or broadcast how I hurt sometimes - but I’ll carry this and these and those with me for as long as it takes. 

She has laugh lines and her eyes crinkle in an amazing way when she laughs.
I don’t have the courage to tell her that it’s been more than three years since I’ve been on a successful date, since I’ve really been interested, since anything felt remotely right.
She surprises me and orders beer in a coffee shop.
I was worried about appearances and so I overdressed, and now I worry that she’ll think I’m too prissy.
The server is kind and keeps away while conversation flows.
She orders a second beer.
Asks me about my family. Asks me about my career. Asks me about my ambitions.
I cannot find the words to express things clearly. I don’t mention that I write or the passions I feel.
Too early for that, too soon for anything so heavy. 
We talk for just under three hours, she gives me a hug outside the door and my grandfather’s teachings keep me from attempting anything more.
Dinner might be nice, she responds when I ask.
She texts me later, on my walk home, and I though I read the message I can’t figure out the signal.
Small steps, I guess. New patterns and a changing view. 

I spent the day in the water, bobbing about in the cold with the company of a few other brave souls. It was good to be back at my local break, cutting a line across familiar green water, filling my lungs with air that tastes somehow like home. I spent too long in the water, as I often do, and as my surfing partners one by one gave up and paddled for shore I felt a weight within my chest begin to gently fall away and disappear beneath the shifting surface, sinking slow like the sun into the distant horizon. 
I’m due to go out, soon - called away to the birthday party of a friend at some bar I’m not quite cool enough to know how to pronounce properly. But for now I’m in bed, warm and moving slow, fresh from the shower and listening to Ludovico Einaudi pull a little music from a piano. I spent the day doing something I love, and in a few hours I’ll be surrounded by the light and sounds of social living, but it is this brief moment, here and now, that I enjoy the most. It is small and simple, with clean sheets and a soft sort of weariness that comes on with a warm weight, like getting drunk on good red wine. The dog snores softly in the corner, the phone is off the hook, rain falls on the windowpane and my heart beats oh-so slow.
It isn’t perfect. But it’s close. 

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.