Intimate worlds. The holidays make me melancholy. I run away, I travel far away with my children, so I don’t feel like I have to smile unnecessarily.

December warns you about things, talks to you, explains to you. It teaches you. The beginning of this month is hypnotic, you don’t know where you have entered. The calendar shows thirty-one days, but it seems that a few more pass within its seconds and minutes. And it all started before Christmas and the end-of-year holidays. It was December 2019. Diego, my husband, had died suddenly in May and had already informed me of his absence that he was not there. He had purchased his ticket to our daughter’s high school graduation several months in advance, and I had to ask the organizing committee to remove his seat from the graduation table. I wanted to fill this round table full of flowers with excitement, like I was covering a beautiful cemetery with flower arrangements. A table set with careful tableware to celebrate and celebrate life, which at that moment seemed both vast and inaccessible to me. Or were the tables at graduation dinners previously smaller? The only reaction at that moment was to dress up, invite two friends, and use the confusion caused by the night, the music, and the alcohol to navigate an unfamiliar territory. December had begun.

In addition to the occasional joy, there are also moments of sadness. The beginning of the month is always a departure with a surprising reaction. I remember that once After my daughter’s senior night, I wondered how I would handle Christmas and New Year’s parties.. He was on alert, waiting for no one in the family to suddenly have health problems.

The mood I have at the beginning of the month is one of happiness, but at the same time something restless and unstable. I usually start the day by playing Christmas music on YouTube to brighten up the morning and singing “Snowman” by “Sia” loudly. I sing his verses emphatically: “Don’t cry, snowman, can’t you feel the sun? It’s Christmas, snowman!” I get scared at even the slightest noise. And I ask myself: What am I running from when I am aware that I am running from something.

The answer is not yet clear to me. I think I subconsciously look for it when I raise my glass to toast each year, in the eyes of my children who share the table with me on those evenings. The Christmas and New Year celebrations are just around the corner and are emotionally charged terrain for me. The expectations I dream up in my head and the resulting frustrations come back like boomerangs on these dates. Often, being happy and hosting a party is an added burden, sometimes shared with almost strangers. Happiness is portrayed in society as the only emotion that should be felt and there is an intrinsic need to maintain it for thirty-one days. Maybe that’s why I’m running away. I could say that on some occasions it is escape, on others it is caution and fear of the impact that each dawn of this twelfth month may have on me.

Towards the middle of the month the scenario changes a little. Everything is in a hurry and melancholy overcomes me. The burden of repetitive rituals that don’t mean the same thing year after year reveals an overwhelm that I carry in my body at this point in the year. I try to respect this date with all the medical examinations already carried out so as not to add additional worries to the psychological concerns. I manage to go to the gym and attend classes on time. As if I could sort out traces of this past year. And this year there are new implications following the publication of a book. Interviews, notes, conversations. My emotions are overflowing.

As the days go by, I prepare myself emotionally to give the emotions as much space as possible. Sensitivity is on the surface and excitement is commonplace.

I remember it was December 2019 and my family insisted and cooperated that we spend the holidays in Europe. We had to leave Argentina. The aim was to occupy the mind and, if possible, even bombard it with the noise and fireworks of a large metropolis.. My cousin Ana, who lives in Marseille, invited us to spend the holidays there and in Paris with her. We left there in mid-December with my three teenage children. First stop: Marseille, second stop: Paris. I remember the Christmas table set with love and prepared by her own hands. Gone were my sky-high blood pressure, my son’s panic attacks, and my daughters’ secret screams. Because there are times when Christmas and New Year tables hurt. It has happened to me that on these nights I suddenly go to the hospital for a check-up because I felt unwell due to stress, because I had a comment from a family member or because I made a joke. And loneliness, pain activation mechanisms and absences hurt less when traveling. I experience the journey as an anxiolytic, as a delayer of negative emotions, as a veil that unfolds as I cross the border like a huge flag that completely covers and protects me. Because I carry my flag, my country, my pain, my happiness and my well-being with me. In every airplane seat I occupy, in every airport I land at.

My mind had kept it in its treasure chest as a reminder of the pure happiness when, at the age of fifteen, my parents took me and my brothers to spend the holidays in Europe. My first white Christmas, covered in snow. My eyes couldn’t take in everything I saw. My first parties as they were lived in the cinema. My father was invited to Saarbrücken (Germany) by Professor Mihail Will from the local law university to give some lectures. We then drove on to Cambridge (England), where he taught at the University of Cambridge for two months. I remember meeting professor, physicist and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in the university cafeteria decorated for Christmas. The doctor was always happy surrounded by his students, who carried him from the classroom to the lunch table every day in his adapted chair.. They were also in the chest of my precious memories: the frozen nights in Ulm, Germany, in front of the fire, the raspberry and currant cake in a cottage in the English countryside at the house of one of my parents’ Argentinian friends, the piano and flute recitals of Professor Will’s children Matthias and Katharina, next to the Christmas tree laden with lights on the cold December afternoons and nights. And my fifteen-year-old eyes bright and shining like twinkling stars.

From the twentieth onwards, urgency is the master of time. The seconds disappear, the minutes disappear and everything becomes excited air inside me. Wind. The focus is on ordering the evening menu, the locations where the two parties will take place and the possible participants. Added to this are meeting friends before the end of the year, completing workshops, attending book presentations and the annual exhibitions of my children, friends and I. The tendency to eat at irregular times, excess fat and alcohol also put a strain on my body and my rest. It is as if he lived in constant alert mode: exhibition dates, diploma presentations, the last days of the year’s work, food and drink reservations, birthday dates and gifts, not to be forgotten.

These Christmas and year-end holidays have a special meaning for me. Luck unexpectedly visited my New Year’s Eve celebration. My daughter has returned from the Middle East after two years and we will finally all be spending the holidays together as a family. The ordeal of his stay on Egypt’s Red Sea coast is over and today he adds another chair to the table. My son’s Japanese wife will also join us at the Christmas and New Year table. Two more chairs. Because there are times when new chairs are added year after year. They are not always removed.

Last year we started the ritual of spending Christmas in Madrid. We create new routines, new memories. Get together in the afternoon to sing Christmas carols, attend midnight mass as a family in the Cathedral of Santa María la Real de la Almudena, visit the Christmas markets in the squares at night or sit down for a cup of coffee in the Plaza del Sol. The minutes pass slowly there. In this place, December speaks to me slowly and unhurriedly. We sit on a bench and conversations flow, plans emerge and ideas are discussed. Quiet, without hectic.

What began as an escape for survival evolved into a new way of breathing. It’s not that I leave the table full of people, sweets and sweet bread, but that the wound that December leaves in me enlightens me. At this moment in my life, the holidays need the silence of a journey to be filled with the respect that my position of distance and this version of myself that will not last forever deserve. Getting on a plane to a distant place is not far from my affection. I don’t run away from them, but I take them with me.

I don’t plan to flee the world forever, carrying my unpleasant memories and fears with me forever on an airplane seat covered with an imaginary protective blanket. December will teach me a lot. Having found a space of shared happiness as a family that invites me to explore new paths is part of the immense world of surprises that this month has in store for me today. As if I had made a pact with myself in which I was also part of a collective feeling of happiness.

For now, in this hypnotic month, I know that I should only focus on experiencing real scenes of well-being and fulfillment with my children, without that emotional territory that is so delicately charged that it does not make me aware that what I am experiencing today is a new and happy gift.