I hate the cold.
I loathe it. I abhor it. And although the is no person or no thing I take more pride in than my home state, a stiff winter wind makes me want to abandon Indiana like a battered lover leaving in the night. I look at descending mercury and see only abuse: torn skin, tearing eyes, desperate cries for relief from an aggressor so ubiquitous and unrelenting that it shakes me to my core. I look out my window and see desolate sparrows, drunk and overwhelmed in the wind, asking, like I, why they didn’t fly south sooner.
A meteorologist or astrologist will explain winter to you simply. “Just a matter of degrees,” they might say. “Our axis is tilted and we’re pointing the wrong direction in winter.” I would tell them they’ve missed the point. And to the psychologist who blame our depression and languidness on a lack of sunlight or time outdoors, I would say that you too don’t understand this season. The weather, the temperature, the wind, the chills, the gray (oh god! the gray) are not instigators. No, they are merely reactors.
In the past months I have witnessed tremendous pain in the people around me. Heartbreak, heart attacks, cancer, suicide, loneliness, and abandonment. We have been here, all of us, for a while. And now nature catches up. We have rubbed off on the air and the sky and ground. Pieces of us have fallen off and condensed and evaporated and rain down in flakes to disappear sorrowfully in our hair or cling tightly in rioting hordes to our shoes. We grew cold a while ago, and when nature couldn’t beat us, it joined us.
And yet, and yet, I won’t surrender. I won’t let any of us surrender. We each take the first step from our homes and let out a resigned “Goddamn” and take another step toward the sadness that created the environment we now curse. I don’t know when I’ll find love again. I don’t know if I can be forgiven or if I’ll be forgotten or if those who are dying right now are any further from life than the rest of us.
But I know I’m in Indiana. We’re all in Indiana. And I know this is my home. I know its cold here for a reason, that nature has followed us into our depression not because it doesn’t want us emerge, but because it doesn’t want us to be alone. In this winter there will be none saved. None will escape. There will be an avalanche and when there is even the mightiest among us will assuredly concede that they’re fucked.
We will spend a winter huddled together, relinquishing candles and furnaces and other bandages we’ve conceived in the past for the simple warmth of each other. Naked and shivering, we will look around and understand that the cold is neither discriminating nor shameful, simultaneously debilitating and liberating. We will shed our clothes and cling to each other and we will do it until the sun comes up.
If our axis is titled the wrong way, let it be straightened in time. And until we are realigned and again feel the light strongly upon our cheeks, let us shiver against each other and be proud of our home and each other. We’re all in Indiana, drunk and overwhelmed by the crippling months ahead, but hopeful and huddled together.
Together.
