The cold wind sends shivers up your spine and puts a heaviness in your heart that wasn’t there before.
The days are shorter now, you leave work in the thin shadows of the streetlights, gosh, what time is it, only five, hmmmm.
You throw the television on and splay images of other people’s lives across the screen, loud laughter or political scandals, anything to distract, divert, delay the sinking feeling that you’re a mouse on a wheel, a brick in a wall, stuck, stuck, stuck.
You toil with meandering ideas of quitting your job, leaving it all, the darkness, the chill of your spine, the hollow look in people’s eyes as you pass them in a hurry on your way to work.
But you don’t.
You take a breath in and you bundle up. You wear your warmest sweater. You light candles at home and a warm fire in your heart that the cold wind can’t touch because this fire burns larger than tangibility, it is part of you, of your soul, and your love is the fuel and your determination the tinder and by gosh are you not going to stand for anything less than ubiquitous and unrelenting coziness.
The days are shorter now, but the nights are longer and you appreciate that. Beauty requires contrast, and light requires darkness for its existence. You leave work in the thin shadows of the streetlights and you entertain yourself with the silliness of your shadow. There you are, black silhouette against the salty pavement, how funny your head looks wrapped up in scarf, how bulky and how large.
Gosh, it’s only five and a whole evening of activities awaits – how lovely that we don’t have to wait for nine to see a sunset. Post sunset life is expansive now, its limits stretch beyond its summer counterparts. 5à7 cocktails, family dinners, you throw the television on with your significant other and feel none of the guilt that accompanies a beautiful summer evening spent hidden indoors, tucked into bed.
You toil with meandering ideas of weeks spent in Cuba or Cancun, and perhaps you do leave for a week, or even two, but you return. Back home. Your love affair with the seasons is trying but you weren’t born to live a life without trials. You were brought to earth in human form, complete with the ability to feel a full range of human emotions and the breadth of four seasons and you do, and the unpleasantness of some of them you accept and even relish for it is beautiful that you can feel them and you know it.
You smile at the strangers you pass on your way home from work and even if they don’t immediately return it, you are satisfied with the knowing that you have brought light to someone on a dark day, and really, what else could you ask for.
