On the day of Christmas, he had no feelings. Every slot for every emotion had been filed away, like his taxes, in folders inside his chest. Dates were written on them for easy retrieval. His hands were reaching out now towards the filing system, copies of emotions that had once been delivered to the sender. Some were sent in passion, and burned in the process. Others lied dormant and never saw the sun, and died slowly in someone's room -- a place he knew or a room he would never see. And some even lived -- survived -- from his youth, unscathed by the erosion of age. He took them all out of the filing cabinet and laid them on his table. Each invisible emotion was there looking up at him, all asking: "Who are you?" "Why are you still with us?" I"m not you," he replied, "you are mere pieces of a life collected and filed away".
Emotions bore the feelings of love and memories they grew up in, molded by the faces and voices he remembered, and the times he lived in; times he would never see anew. On Christmas, he brought them out like gifts, and reopened them slowly, so as not to damage the sides, aged brown and dry through the accumulation and storage he afforded them. They did not speak immediately; and, in some ways, could not do so. The man who carried them was not the man to easily deal in listening to their lot. The voice of reason was accountable to them. Yet his heart was unprepared.
It was a gift to see life opened. The presence of himself in front of these emotions; that they were alive, more alive than himself, was his Christmas. He embraced their history, and the times he gained by having lived in them. He suffered, too, from their signs, pointing to conclusions he no longer could bear, arrows towards some Ultimate direction. He was a witness of a certain kind of mortality, the loss that falls through one's own hands: these storage receipts of feelings, and the worn envelopes that would soon enclose them, indefinitely. He said good-bye and filed them away. Next year would be Christmas, the lights would be flashing, and he wished he would be at this table to feel his emotions, again.
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