Flowers in December

It is late December now, and a snowy blanket swathes the earth back where the roads are winding, and the hills are rolling. Your past semester evanesces, a sharpened presence of a different time settling in its place. A bustling small town at the height of festivities struggles against the quieting nature of an austere winter cloak, radio holiday regulars muffled within its envelope. The cold is foreboding, and this year it nips and bites with an unfamiliar ferocity, unrelenting, especially during the nights. Stepping outside steals your breath and obscures your sight with a blurry film, and everything is blue—not just your lips and fingernail beds. The sky is a colorless void, the only relief the flash of distant ruby hollies caught in leafless trees, and you feel similarly desolate. How tempting it is to retreat behind the threshold and find refuge in the warmth of a childhood bedroom, left identical to its version years ago, an unchanging time capsule.

But you go outside, still. You don’t have your usual jacket, and for a moment, it seems unbearable. But you walk, still. Your legs become numb, but you move them all the same.

You persist because you always have. You’ve always done it. In scorching heat, pouring rain, hurricanes and tornadoes, floods and volcanoes—that time the earth quaked and you thought it would all end—you still open the door and walk the path. You’ve always done it, no matter the circumstances, because you told yourself you would.

On your walk, you begin to warm, naturally. You notice the white wintry scene welcoming any configuration of the dancing light of car headlights, street lamps, or Christmas bulbs strung imperfectly across storefront displays. The snowflakes are mesmerizing, not menacing. Traffic jams signal a sprawling main street, kept alive by locals and visitors, families and friends, all fastened to a singular location for reasons involving an unconditional love, one unbound to a geographic boundary. A type of love earned not through continuous proximity, but through perpetual reciprocity, through choosing and being chosen. This love diffuses into balmy kitchen aromas, chaotic gift shops anticipating Christmas surprises, two coffee mugs set on the island in the morning instead of one, shoveled driveways, cars stuffed full to fit everyone, and sunflowers found out of season because someone remembered they were your favorite. This love consumes you, and you forget how cold it once was.

To my best friends and my full home, the most magical birthday and Christmas season, 

Love El.