It isn't easy to say how you feel: The work of Christmas morning

Friday 12/26/25

Shortly after midnight on Christmas morning, I awoke and began work again on "Love, Your Mouse," which I have returned to in the early hours of this morning. It has felt like a holy experience. But that is the story. A holy experience itself. It's a humbling work, which has required all I have to give, all of my ability, all of my effort to master that ability, and the person I have worked to become, in the doing of it. I think I shall finally be finished today. It feels like a crime against humanity, against decency, against love itself that no one will be permitted to read this entire story right now because of who created it and how he much he is despised by those who never could.

***

Some mice possess the rare gift of wanting and being able to listen, which is different than simply hearing sounds that happened to be made. The mouse has listened with care to words spoken earlier by the people who are now asleep. She knows this is the cat’s last night. Tomorrow morning the cat will make the trip to the animal doctor where the mouse realizes that she herself will never go, because that’s not how it works for mice that live in walls the way it does for cats that sleep near fires.

It isn’t easy to say how you feel no matter how deeply you feel it. The more you do, the harder it often is. But the mouse keeps trying.

“I can’t be someone who lies down and gives in, which would be the same thing as being in the open when you are present,” she writes, and then reads the words back, nodding her head.

That’s fair, she thinks. And if we can’t be fair, what can we really be? 

“I respect you for challenging me and making me more than I would have been on my own. For helping me to better understand courage. We have never been close, the two of us, but you’ve made me think hard about what closeness can mean. Perhaps there are more kinds than we’re aware, unless we know someone as I’ve known you, and maybe as you’ve known me. I hope so. I have always believed in you. And in believing in you, you’ve helped me believe in myself. For this I am grateful, and for knowing you, I am blessed.”