Their mouths unhinge in unison with the lifting of their chins; above and all around, the lights dance. We stand for a moment in the cloud of cold they bring in with them – they never stay long enough to be rid of it, not completely. The roughness of their hands, the nothings exchanged, is Christmas.

It’s hard not to feel like I’m just jerking off into the internet when I write anything here – mostly because that’s exactly the essence of any social media platform, the stroking of the self, right? And that’s fine. Healthy even. My seventh-grade gym teacher told me it was, anyway.

I keep starting sentences that want to turn into pages, and I don’t have pages in me right now. What I do have in me is cereal, because I just ate breakfast. And what I’m about to have in me is the rest of the Christmas snacks in this office before they all get thrown out today. Because we won’t be here for a week, which I keep remembering and being thrilled about, because I haven’t had a vacation in two years. And over the next few days I’ll alternate between feelings of sexiness and grotesqueness, and feelings of deep emptiness and overwhelming love (mostly overwhelming love – I’m lucky), because it’s the end of another year and there are tiny lights in all the dark corners.

I don’t know how to say I think it’s okay that we love and are grateful for our cinnamon-pine-berry-scented living rooms when the buildings all around us are burning down and people live inside of them. I don’t know how to say anything at all without minimizing the tragedies we’re watching on the screens of the many devices through which we are now, somehow, more and less than ever connected to each other. It is not, excuse me, fucking okay. Things are not okay.

It’s also not okay to miss out on all the goodness we are fortunate enough to have surrounding us. It’s not okay to let ourselves become mired in all the shit. There’s hope, as long as we’re willing and able to be of service. We must learn from Artax.

So this is what I’m telling myself this year: Love and be grateful for whatever it is you have, even if it’s not a lot, even if it’s bullshit. If you have it to love, love it. And don’t be an asshole.

Merry Christmas.