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cosmolinguistI bought my last Christmas present yesterday, but I still somehow didn't quite feel like I was done yet.
I just chalked the feeling up to free-floating anxiety looking for something to latch on to -- a very plausible explanation! -- until I looked at the date today and realized.
It's my brother's birthday today. Getting him two presents was just part of my Christmas-shopping routine. So much so that I already had money put aside for that year's by the time he died (which, unable to contemplate spending on anything else, I ended up giving to charity), about two weeks before his birthday. The next year, I found myself veering toward his favorite store in the mall, before I realized and stumbled back to the direction I'd been walking in.
There's so much routine this time of year. So much that's the same as every other year, whether we think of it as tradition or torture. Thus some small part of my subconscious always nags at me that there's something incomplete, something we haven't done yet, someone we're still waiting for.
But we'd always be waiting, and we can't do that. Life goes on, and so too must we, but to what?
I just chalked the feeling up to free-floating anxiety looking for something to latch on to -- a very plausible explanation! -- until I looked at the date today and realized.
It's my brother's birthday today. Getting him two presents was just part of my Christmas-shopping routine. So much so that I already had money put aside for that year's by the time he died (which, unable to contemplate spending on anything else, I ended up giving to charity), about two weeks before his birthday. The next year, I found myself veering toward his favorite store in the mall, before I realized and stumbled back to the direction I'd been walking in.
There's so much routine this time of year. So much that's the same as every other year, whether we think of it as tradition or torture. Thus some small part of my subconscious always nags at me that there's something incomplete, something we haven't done yet, someone we're still waiting for.
But we'd always be waiting, and we can't do that. Life goes on, and so too must we, but to what?
(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-09 11:52 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-09 03:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-12-13 10:33 am (UTC)