Everybody was dressed like they might need to make an appearance on another's

Instagram

. A lot of black and light tans,. A lot of wool and metal.

You might not expect me to be fan of the holidays if you knew me in real life but i did actually enjoy this time of year. Granted not for the same reasons other people did: like

the holidays

 and gift giving itself.

I just liked seeing people dress so well even with the cold. And i enjoyed not being bothered by anyone.

I don't know if anybody who knew me was aware, but this holiday season there wasn't a single soul who trying to see me for the holidays. Everybody on my workplace

Slack

spoke in ways that assumed everybody had a family or a friends group to burrow into for the end of the year. Nobody could know I would spend the holidays alone.

In a previous life this bugged me. Holiday season without the traditional sense of family made me feel eerily close to death. Not in a way where I thought I would die soon or something. it was more like a closeness to the aesthetics of death. As in I could feel what dying in this modern life was like: coming back home alone, everything dimmed down, until you put the

Netflix

on, and everybody else's attention booked for.  Nobody calling or waiting for you.

Most days of the year you could drown this aesthetic of death out. Everybody's got their cup of tea. Television. Books. Hook ups. Travel. Drugs. Fast food. Self improvement. Whatever it might be there were plenty of opportunities to crank the dials just a tad in order to silence the noise of death.

Some people even go and watch movies that explicitly depict a caricature of death as a way to look away from death itself. Watching

Bruce Willis

or

Arnold Schwarzenegger

mow down dozens of men using machine guns makes us feel a bit more comfortable with this thing called dying, like it was nothing big.

That's what I grew up on. 80s action flicks. I tried watching them this holiday season and couldn't get through a single one.