ABSINTHE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER

What is there to do when Yuletides are simply dreams and no chestnuts roasted await you? I am not home this Christmas. I'm three thousand miles away sitting in the desert looking for a star to follow.

Would that I could see my family's faces, those faces that are reflections of my own-- so similar, so familiar. Would that I could heal my father faster. Would that I could console my mother in person. Brothers and sisters, we'd exchange gifts, then gather around a meal, first in prayer, then in joy. The air outside would be sharp and cold. Snow, like the feathers of angels, would fill the ground. The house would be warm with heat and light.

Instead I wander these sands of cinematic mirage, this place of gilded temptresses, this land that buys your hopes for pennies on the dollar and sells them reconfigured and unrecognizable. The years here have baptized me in fire. I am reborn same as before and wholly new.

I've carved a small place in the dunes where I find solace. In my apartment by the oasis, I sit in the solitude of prophets and artists and sip the drink of madness, the verte liquor that worms through the wood of the iconoclastic brain and lights the fire in the soul of creation.

Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.

Daughters of the Green Lady, lovers of artists and poets, actors and musicians, all manner of thieves and outcasts-- for this night they are my Yuletide companions. They will see me through to the dawn when we give thanks for the birth of the Prince of Peace. They will see me through the longing for home.