Merry Christmas

The whether has finally cooled down, and it is brilliant, crisp. I have not woken up sweating in almost a week. As I sit in my room my shirt is off out of habit, and yet I find I am shivering slightly and nestling my chin into my left shoulder for the feeling of warmth and raspy new shavenness. There is a slight breeze penetrating the windows and a phantom woody smell of burning that Sam claims is merely the return of my tumor hangs in the air.

My sleep has been odd and off the last couple nights, and my thinking is crackly and disconnected, when it is there at all. I have two exams next week and a couple papers looming, and yet, or perhaps as a result of this, I can taste a metallic, chilly, saliva inspiring feeling of exuberance and optimistic inevitability, like the feeling I get under my tongue before tasting my fathers fresh salsa. It pervades the periphery of the profound emptiness which blossomed out of returning from school after a long three day week and half sleeping from 8:00 PM to 11:45 PM and then waking to find the house empty of everything including my sense of time and space.

It is the combination of these elements—the cold, the burning, the crackly, the anxiety, the optimism, the emptiness—that has given me the profound feeling that it must be Christmas Eve.

I miss and love you all.  Eat, Drink, Breathe and Pray, and I will see many of you a couple months after tomorrow.