Joining Them.

Dear Friend,

I am only writing to you, this way, because if you can’t beat them you have to join them, as Bill says. It is almost Christmas and I am not going home. Charlie’s mom is worried that I will be alone. I won’t be alone, but I will be in some ways. I am alone in some ways all the time. Christmas should be no different, I think. It seems to me like it is all a bunch of selfishness wrapped up in green and gold paper with reindeer stamped all over it. And people pretend it is selflessness they are imbibing when they fill up another moose-shaped mug of eggnog. I don’t even like the taste of eggnog and I definitely don’t like moose-shaped mugs.

I have been reading a lot. Charlie has been reading The Fountainhead for the first time, too. It is really great to hear his perspective. I have never been able to hear a perspective on the book that I liked as much as my own. His is different than mine, but I like to hear him talk about it. He sees things much earlier than I saw them when I was reading it. He feels the same things I felt, but in a different way. He described one of my favorite scenes in the book as “an explosion of two equals, like forcing magnets of the same charge together.” I started to cry. It is making me love books again. It is making me want to read The Fountainhead again with these new eyes.

I wish that Perks of Being a Wallflower hadn’t ended so soon. I miss my new friends. I always feel this way when I end a good book and I guess that is how I know it is a good book to me. I thought about starting it over again, but part of me just wants to digest the first go-around. A bigger part of me wants my friends back. I think I will start again tonight.

Love Always,

Sam

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