Christmas Eve
Dec. 24th, 2025 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
k_sereinroomA relaxing evening. It’s late and I hear the rain outside. All seems right in my world again at the moment.
It was very windy last night, so much so that I couldn’t sleep. The windows in this old building rattled and I could hear things banging around outside. So I got up, made some lemon balm tea with honey and watched detective shows online. Then slept five hours in the morning.
When I got up, my food box had arrived. Everything seems to be OK. The gel packs had melted, but the items in the insulated bag were still cooler than room temperature. The cilantro and celery revived in cold water, and I believe everything is safe to eat. The small pleasure of having interesting food to graze on is important to me.
My online friend in the virtual world is back home from Wales and we just spent three hours chatting. I joined the world 14 years ago, and never imagined that I would stay that long. At the time I was very ill and spent most of my time in bed. I would be up for about two mornings a week and three afternoons. It’s a miracle I got though it. Anyway, I lived it and don’t feel like writing about it.
I fought to hang on to what I had, including my brain. I have never enjoyed games or crossword puzzles, so I did some creative projects which might be written about someday. So I joined this virtual world with a very steep learning curve, and the usual mean people that one finds online, and it was a lifeline.
Then I met my friend K. over 10 years ago. It was very random. And we’ve been hanging out chatting for two or three hours at a time, three or four evenings (for me) a week. I can’t mention him to anyone in real life anymore because they look at me as though I’ve said I’m having an online romance with a Nigerian Prince. It isn’t like that at all. Neither one of us is romantic. But we like the big picture view of the world, and we are comfortable with depth. I’m a constellation thinker with CPTSD, and he is very creative and a HSP on the autism spectrum, which he learned of later in life.
Not Nigerian, but born in Zimbabwe, and lived as a young child during the Rhodesian Bush War. And he and his family eventually had to leave his homeland. Now he lives in the UK. So there is a time difference. I stay up late in the evening, and he gets up between about 3:00 and 6:00 am, which he used to do as a habit anyway for years. He’s 23 years younger than me; I’m a couple of years younger than his mother.
We work on creative projects and chat about life. There’s some small talk but we have the kind of conversations that I haven’t had since my brief time attending a university. We don’t know each other’s real names and are careful with some details about our lives because our communication is very valuable to us. I honestly don’t think I could have survived the last ten years without chatting with him.
So, I just spent Christmas Eve chatting with him and it feels right. My brother left a message on my landline this afternoon, and I didn’t pick up. I feel so bad for the tragedy of his life, the dysfunctional home we grew up in, the abuse and neglect, and his mental illness. But I can’t help him, and he is very bad for me. This isn’t unusual; many people have situations like this in their life. So many things are amplified right now; so many things need resolution and reparation.
There’s only so much any one of us can do. This sounds heavy, but I live with this. And yet there was lightness and play in my conversation this evening.
It turns out that tomorrow, Christmas day, both of us want to oven roast vegetables in a sheet pan.
These are small, living life things that most wouldn’t understand, and I don’t care about that anymore.
Merry Christmas.
It was very windy last night, so much so that I couldn’t sleep. The windows in this old building rattled and I could hear things banging around outside. So I got up, made some lemon balm tea with honey and watched detective shows online. Then slept five hours in the morning.
When I got up, my food box had arrived. Everything seems to be OK. The gel packs had melted, but the items in the insulated bag were still cooler than room temperature. The cilantro and celery revived in cold water, and I believe everything is safe to eat. The small pleasure of having interesting food to graze on is important to me.
My online friend in the virtual world is back home from Wales and we just spent three hours chatting. I joined the world 14 years ago, and never imagined that I would stay that long. At the time I was very ill and spent most of my time in bed. I would be up for about two mornings a week and three afternoons. It’s a miracle I got though it. Anyway, I lived it and don’t feel like writing about it.
I fought to hang on to what I had, including my brain. I have never enjoyed games or crossword puzzles, so I did some creative projects which might be written about someday. So I joined this virtual world with a very steep learning curve, and the usual mean people that one finds online, and it was a lifeline.
Then I met my friend K. over 10 years ago. It was very random. And we’ve been hanging out chatting for two or three hours at a time, three or four evenings (for me) a week. I can’t mention him to anyone in real life anymore because they look at me as though I’ve said I’m having an online romance with a Nigerian Prince. It isn’t like that at all. Neither one of us is romantic. But we like the big picture view of the world, and we are comfortable with depth. I’m a constellation thinker with CPTSD, and he is very creative and a HSP on the autism spectrum, which he learned of later in life.
Not Nigerian, but born in Zimbabwe, and lived as a young child during the Rhodesian Bush War. And he and his family eventually had to leave his homeland. Now he lives in the UK. So there is a time difference. I stay up late in the evening, and he gets up between about 3:00 and 6:00 am, which he used to do as a habit anyway for years. He’s 23 years younger than me; I’m a couple of years younger than his mother.
We work on creative projects and chat about life. There’s some small talk but we have the kind of conversations that I haven’t had since my brief time attending a university. We don’t know each other’s real names and are careful with some details about our lives because our communication is very valuable to us. I honestly don’t think I could have survived the last ten years without chatting with him.
So, I just spent Christmas Eve chatting with him and it feels right. My brother left a message on my landline this afternoon, and I didn’t pick up. I feel so bad for the tragedy of his life, the dysfunctional home we grew up in, the abuse and neglect, and his mental illness. But I can’t help him, and he is very bad for me. This isn’t unusual; many people have situations like this in their life. So many things are amplified right now; so many things need resolution and reparation.
There’s only so much any one of us can do. This sounds heavy, but I live with this. And yet there was lightness and play in my conversation this evening.
It turns out that tomorrow, Christmas day, both of us want to oven roast vegetables in a sheet pan.
These are small, living life things that most wouldn’t understand, and I don’t care about that anymore.
Merry Christmas.
no subject
Date: 2025-12-26 12:02 am (UTC)