i should follow the same advice in my entries

I am looking at a box of Christmas Cards.

I don’t know who to send them to. I’d give them out at work, but I didn’t buy enough for everyone on my floor. I’d send them to friends, but I don’t have their home addresses.

So, I guess what I’m saying is if you want a Christmas card, send me your address. Because you are my friends. No, really.

It took me back to a really old memory, looking at those cards. I guess I was about seven, and we were about to move to California from Virginia in about two weeks. I was opening my gifts in front of my parents and I got to the present from my best friend Becky. I opened the present and there was a card inside. I read the card out loud to my family. I wish I still had this letter… what I remember it saying was something like, “Well, I’ll miss you a lot when you move, but you should make sure to come and visit often so we can stay best friends forever. I love you and I’ll miss you.” I looked up after reading the card and my mother and father were crying and holding each other. At the time I thought they had lost their minds. “Would you like to call her and have her for dinner?” my mother kept asking me. “She can spend the night if she wants.” “It’s Christmas,” I kept thinking.

I had kind of forgotten that memory. Where it used to make me miss my old friends terribly, this time it kind of gave me a kind of sympathy for my parents. They didn’t want to have to move me around all the time. I used to get so mad at them. I thought if they just had normal jobs like everyone else we wouldn’t get shipped from place to place. I remember thinking that they were doing it on purpose because they didn’t like this school or that friend or whatever. But this memory is different. I’m seeing my parents in a light I couldn’t possibly have understood when I was seven. It hurt them to move me around so much. They didn’t want to see me go through that place after place, and they couldn’t possibly make me understand why we kept having to pack up and go hundreds or thousands of miles away every six months.

You know, when I was younger I hated moving around so much. When Eric and I were visiting my parents last week, we were in the city that I spent my high school years in. When we went to Pittsburgh last year to see his family and friends, we were surrounded by people that he knew and loved and grew up with. When I went to see my family, it was just my family. “Do you find it strange that I don’t have any friends in my old city?” I asked him.

“A little, yeah.”

“Well, most of them moved away, or we stopped talking, or we got into some stupid fight… or I don’t know what happened to them.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, it’ll make for an interesting reunion.”

I’ve just never had a sense of “home,” a place where I can go and I’ve got years and years of memories and stories and friends and all that. Around the holidays I tend to start thinking about it, as everyone else is making plans to see all of these people.

Hey, do you guys know that it’s 78 degrees outside? It’s December 2nd and almost 80 degrees outside. I’m a little peeved about it. I want my Christmas holiday at least breezy. Yesterday Eric wore shorts and we had lunch outside. I want my winter holiday.

Eric and I watched Face/Off last night. Both of us had seen it, but not since it came out in the theater.

[scripty]
PAMIE
I still say they didn’t change their teeth, and that would be a dead give-away. Look at Nicky Cage’s teeth. They’re like fangs.

ERIC
You remember where I showed you how you’ll know it’s me if my face ever gets switched, right?

PAMIE
No.

ERIC
Feel right here.

PAMIE
Ew.

ERIC
So, if you ever think that my face has been switched, you just feel right there, okay?

PAMIE
Like you’re the first boy who tried to convince me of that.

ERIC
Ha.

PAMIE
I forgot how much face touching there is in this film.

ERIC
Less weeping, more shooting.
[/scripty]

You think I’d tell you how I know that it’s Eric? If I post it here, I’d lose the only thing I have to know if his face gets switched. I mean, come on, it’d be like posting my ATM code.