Melancholy and Nostalgia are walking side by side.

Well, they seem to get along..

I'm planning a trip home this Christmas, hoping it will heal, and if not, pamper me, somehow. This will be the first Christmas I won't be alone in town for the last 3 years.

I guess I'm still pretty sad and feel myself such a failure. Friends feel sorry for me and one of them cooked dinner for me tonight. It was pasta with mushrooms and asparagus. We were then trying to figure out words written on the back of a bunch of Venice California postcards he recently collected. Some of them are more than a hundred years old. Those were cards that kids wrote to mothers, husbands wrote to wives, cousins wrote to cousins, and a couple of them were more like the sender asking for a date. What is really crazy is that on many cards, there's just name, town, and state. No zip code, no street, let alone street number. And yet those cards still got delivered. We wondered if there was only one post office in one town and that person had to go to downtown to get all her mail. We then wondered how the person my friend bought from collected these cards. I would always save the postcards I received and so would he. So we guessed it must be that those people who used to own those cards already died. At one moment I was thinking.. how I wished B was there sharing the moment with us, with me, and enjoying the beautiful pictures of Venice. He likes history. Then I had to remind myself about the reality.

How time flies. 2008 is almost ending. Here I'm relearning how to find happiness that comes from within.