Holidays were more relaxing when I didn’t have to travel 3,000 miles. Except, of course, all of the stressful shit about worrying about my mother, backing stopping her holiday stress and the usual family frivolity and layers of cliched dysfunction and baggage. Yes, the olden days. We’ll always have Paris.

Now, I’m here alone in my borrowed room. M. having forsaken me for the coast. And, really, I blame him not at all. I myself yearn for the left and the home and the sea breeze.

At the same time, it’s great to see people, and I’m sorry for the people I will see in too small doses and/or miss seeing entirely. Tomorrow, I may try to go a little wassailing to make up some time for people I see too little.

As always, I think pretty much in any adult life, holidays are that thin line between the life you live and the friends you choose versus the was that isn’t (and may never have been) that your family sees. To me, today, that’s a striking contrast.

Last night I was out with friends who I love for not having to explain myself. Friends that I made through the performing and writing I have chosen. Outside that enclave it’s a bit tough to describe a ridiculous and spontaneous dancing circle at a bar expanding as the crowd jumped in to the scene we created. It’s also nigh impossible to impart the rambling, impassioned discussions about writing, performing, getting out some voices inside that call for that sort of thing. Ginsburg’s without the pretentiousness implied by my tagging along to the Beats or the LSD.

I mean for some hours in the evening there was all of this:

And, like Brigadoon or Cinderella’s mousey carriage or the earth before the Rapture, the morning came and that made up world was gone. A prosaic trudge back to the town where I was raised, locked out of the house where I have never lived but spent much time, back nestled with the folks who invite me back time and again despite my whinging, thankful for the night-owl genes of my nephew for letting me back in the almost dark house, but back on terra firma, my erstwhile “home.” Feet of clay and weird, little sisterness seeping back to my veins.

On the plus side, by moving away the people best taken in smaller doses are kept in little medicinal rations. And by returning, you realize that the life you have made, the one you choose, is the right one. I love the days I have with people who only know me now and don’t make me feel alien or tell me I’m stupid. (In fact, I regret the number of years I had of growing up and hearing the word “stupid.” I don’t like hearing it now.)

I never cry in California. But, back “home,” I’m crying now.

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