We gather.
We gather to be made into thankful creatures; if it works for a day we are lucky. We make pilgrimages to homelands past, foreign territories of the mind distorted by years of absence and the way things change while we are gone. Or we decide that these pilgrimages are not enough, that they do not satisfy the nostalgia that commands them, that these false pilgrimages hurt more than they help, dragging out the disconnect between what was and what is into something monstrous. Still, we are talked into visits. We are talked into being the people that we once were, flip of a switch, wear the discarded clothing of our childhood, adults made altogether small. We surround ourselves with those who have loved us and abused us. We will eat dinner with these people.