The approach of Christmas feels surreal. Decorations abound, but the weather is warm and the days are long, the opposite of the cozy white Christmases I’m used to. My parents are also celebrating the holiday somewhere warm, having decamped to Hawaii, as is their new tradition. I went with them last year. Once we no longer had Penny, it felt masochistic to simply sit at home and go through the same motions we always had. I know they wish I was with them, but we have plans to Skype on Christmas morning. Like all of our family traditions, we’re left with a sad facsimile of what was.

On Christmas Eve, I’m kept up late by the sound of fireworks, and eventually I go to sit in the courtyard, bringing the bottle of wine and the panettone that the landlady has sweetly left on all of our doorsteps. At midnight, the city releases thousands of paper lanterns into the sky, and I can’t help but be moved; it feels like such a hopeful tradition.

On Christmas Day, I Skype with my parents, but my Internet is weak, and it makes a painful encounter even more so. It feels like some clumsy metaphor: my connection with my parents, once strong, is now strained. The screen freezes midconversation, their disembodied voices continuing on, and in their captured still, I think I can see all the anguish they’re trying to keep from me beneath their suntans. I admire them now more than ever: they’ve stayed together in the face of everything, and they turned toward rather than against each other. I know I should be grateful for my family, now three. I try to make it sound like I’m having fun: I tell them about the plazas and the tango dancers I see everywhere on the sidewalks.

My landlady is traveling somewhere to see family. She’s given us a friend’s name and number in case of emergencies. Casa de Volver. I wonder who has come here before me. I wonder who will come here after.

Penny Has a Boyfriend

IT WOULD be hard to overstate how much the idea of Blair and Luke moving away rocked my world at thirteen. They were really the only friends I had, though Blair in those days was more of a big brother figure—tasked with keeping tabs on Luke and me as we crashed down mountains all winter and spring and took to those same trails on our mountain bikes in the summer. It wasn’t that I disliked other girls; I just didn’t get them.