I don’t know what happened to the last year.

I looked around last night at holiday decorations and wrapped gifts and thought, it seems only a month or two back that I was cleaning up the detritus of opened gifts.

I can’t remember where my year went. I can’t think of anything I did without looking back over my blog, and then, I see a summer vacation that was over in a blink and seems to be a few weeks ago.

Is this just how it works as one gets older? Time compresses, years becoming seasons, then months, then weeks?

When I was my kids age, I recall the glacial pace of time waiting for xmas; the feeling, when it ended, that it would never come again. I remember starting to count hours after my birthday, wondering how it could possibly be so many ’til santa arrived.

A month ago I was shocked at how quickly thanksgiving had come up; I remember thinking at the time christmas will be here in a blink, and I’m not ready for it.

Is it just that my mother’s death – and the stress, trauma and exhaustion that came with it – re-set my clock? Anything before september seems oddly compressed.

I feel oddly disconnected from the world. Christmas for me has always been an emotional time; giddy and happy, or dark and sad. This year, I look at tinkling lights and hear my favorite christmas music, and I feel like I’m watching a movie about something other people celebrate. Even Disneyland, with it’s old-fashioned-holiday-on-crack atmosphere, didn’t break through the bubble I’m in. It made me smile – I enjoyed the music and the beautiful holiday decorations (because no one, anywhere, does xmas decoration like disney), but it never crossed over into my nervous system and lit me up the way it has in the past. I didn’t care. I rode a few rides, but it didn’t matter than much if I missed one, or if I spent half my day waiting in a line.

It’s not that I’m sad – it just feels like I fast-forwarded past half the year. I seem to have missed the season changes, missed the leaves changing and the air growing colder. I missed the summer sun. It went from early spring chill to early winter chill without me knowing anything.

Where are the breaks on this thing? I want to slow it down.