UP EARLY, A LITTLE after six, the studio masked in darkness, without definition. I crawled out of bed and sat at the desk. The sun still hidden but to the east a purplish glow growing in the cloud-swollen sky. I pushed the chair in front of the window and propped my feet on the ledge. Thomas jumped in my lap. We watched the silent dark, and in time the coming dawn chased the darkness to the west, the dawn of a new day. The trains passed. Most of the cars were empty.

I placed Thomas beside Carolyn. She didn’t stir, which didn’t surprise me since I had quickly learned the girl could sleep through anything, even her alarm, which she did most mornings. I dressed and kissed her on the cheek and placed a few slices of bread in a plastic baggie and walked out the door. The weather was brisk but not too bad, midthirties by my guess, which was a welcome break from the usual single digits. An overcast sky above a landscape that looked faded. I kept my hands pocketed, wandering the silent streets. Everything was closed, deepening the already desolate feel the holidays seem to worsen for the lonely of the world. Christmas, that time when you yearn for the very things you don’t mind doing without at other times of the year. An occasional car passed, but for the most part, the city remained indoors. What were they doing? Did families still wake together on Christmas morning, eat breakfast, open gifts, snap pictures with arms draped over shoulders?

I sat at a bench near Wrigley, removed the bread, and broke the slices into small pieces I then threw to the pigeons. There were three at first but the group swelled to over thirty by the time the bread was gone, and once it was, the birds quickly vanished and then there was only me.

I sat and thought of my mother and of all the Christmases we had shared. They now seemed so far in the past that they were instead a part of somebody else’s life, a life that had been recanted to me in a bar late one night at a table littered with bottles. I missed her terribly, and hated that her image was no longer sharp in my mind, no matter how hard and how long I thought of her. What remains of my mother are those things I still remember, and what I remember, sadly, is growing smaller each day.