So after a while I always withdraw and leave the room. (This is me not figuring out how to start and tries to begin in the middle. It failed. Let’s try that again.)

Christmas. You can tell it’s that week already. Not because of the lights in the streets, the blinged up trees or the decorations in the windows — professional windows or amateur windows, the tramp-lamps are all the same. No. It’s that from now until a few days after new year’s eve, I feel kind of astray. Even though, like on Christmas Day, when there are lots of relatives around I feel lost, I don’t fit in. At all. It might be something wrong with me, but after a while I always withdraw and leave the room, letting the relatives and family take care of themselves. Laughing. Having fun.

The solitude isn’t really a choice, even though it might seem like it. But if I can help it, I’d rather choose to be alone by myself than in the company of others. It’s more proper somehow, and not so sad and pathetic. It is by far the most harrowing time of the year, but I don’t dislike Christmas and I like the snow (when we have some that is, give me snow! This is Sweden for fuck sake, polar bears in the streets and penguins eating the babies and all that). So it’s not Christmas’ fault, even though it tries a bit too hard sometimes. I can’t even blame the people, so it must be me. Some mental flaw — or a defect if you will, a horrible mutation — that makes me bored, alone and miserable with a calendar precision that’s downright uncanny. As they say in the X-Files promos: “I want to believe.” Believe that it might not happen the next year or that it will pass like a flu. But that seems more and more unlikley. So it must be me.

A slightly more upbeat thing: here’s an old drawing of a snowman.