winter

in years past, winter would reach out through autumn and seize summer to throttle it, and its bones would clatter to the ground like leaves and its blood would leech out like morning colour as the sun rises coldly. in years past, winter was a heartless killer and its punishment was an empty white room and a grey prison barred with rain.
there would be an autumn, a time of cool sunshine and rebellious brightness filling a canvas swallowed by clouds and water; saturated by rain, autumn’s colours saturated red, orange, yellow. this was in years past.
now, i curl tiredly on the couch near the window at 4 p.m. on a sunday, say, in december and wonder – is this darkness its own fault? i wonder, recalling the oppressive grey heat of deep summer, the air heavy with particulates, the trees dying without colour while summer reigned, if winter had no hand in its bleakness. this dead season, butted up against summer with shocking abruptness, is just what’s left. there wasn’t even enough for autumn – this year or the last, if i correctly recall; maybe just a day of it, where a single tree in the woods waited for the ancient tradition of transition though its companions could not hold out. only the one tree was granted the funerial costume of gold to remember the richness of its body; the others died in the green of their adulthood grown brittle in bitter waiting.
i have a new perspective on winter, now, though it’s not helping me bear its darkness any better. i’m just bearing with it, this year, instead of bearing against it, and i’m not sure if that’s a meaningful distinction. in fact, if it means anything, it’s that i am feeling bleak and empty and have confidence that i did not have the energy to reach back into summer to drag myself closer to it. i did not cause this; i’m just what’s left, and i’m dark and growing colder.
i’m closer to the winter now. not that i was ever full summer, blooming madly, but i was surely the end of summer – draining colours, feeling more and more tired. i was the positive, on which was exerted negative pressure; something alive, even if just its remnants, feeling the throttling hand of the vague, murdering winter.
now i am the winter, but not that active grasping claw of it, and the summer left behind was not youth or promise. the summer was a crop of lusty weeds that devoured every nutrient and ate the earth from under itself and my winter is a landscape of withered stalks, unrecognizable and featureless. i’m just what’s left.

i don’t really believe the rest of this, or at least struggle to apply it to myself alone in the dark, a bitter winter – i don’t feel the warmth of the season lying in closeness, or see hope being a seed beneath the frost and winter being the canvas upon which spring will paint – but if i were with a person who, as i am, curls on the couch by the window as night falls in the afternoon – if i were crosslegged beside them, i would say, you are not just harrowed you are hallowed.
i would not say, summer has stolen from you but spring will give it back, because what has been taken can never be returned; for the act of taking, the experience of loss, is not erased by newness: at best it is put aside. i would not argue the winter – i know it. i know that platitudes will not sow it or kindness colour it; it is winter, bloodless and pale, exhausted, barren.
to this person, this person as drained as i am, i would not say, winter is not what you think it is, for it is. it’s meaningless to pretend it isn’t. the words are empty that put a mask on the season, because words aren’t warmth nor are assurances comfort. you cannot stave off starvation with a quote and neither can you heat frozen fingers by saying, there is no cold around you.
i wouldn’t say, you are not alone in your winter, because i would be saying it from the middle of my own wasteland and would hear it echoed back at me, hollow, by the cold concrete walls of the sky of the season.
what this person’s winter is, curled up with their pillows, is immutable, just as mine is.
what i would say, and try to believe though the effort would as well draw the sun back up for a golden evening, is that your unchangeable winter, its fatal expanse, its endless exhaustion, exists alongside an identical winter but with a little cabin in it.
this cabin is in a different winter than yours – it’s not being forced into your winter, which is exactly the dead entropic wilderness you know it is, just like mine is – but it exists, too, i think, i would say. the little house is the only unique thing in this – other – season, and the featureless ground just by its windows is different, too, because a tiny spill of light colours it.
i would say, this winter with this one cabin exists alongside yours, exists like a mist of a world or like a picture drawn on wax paper just above yours exactly, and sometimes like a mist or sometimes like wax paper it moves away on the rotation of the air or doesn’t hold the lines of a pen – it doesn’t exist solidly atop your world and i will not insist on its presence as immutable, like your winter and my winter is.
i hardly believe this, but in order to say it to this person looking out at 4 p.m. midnight i think i must, if only in the most ephemeral sense, barely grasping belief – my belief is a speck, then, but maybe that’s enough, because breath is a vapour and it keeps us alive. what i would say next, believing it like a rattling breath when it’s too cold to see it, is that sometimes the cabin will be accessible from your world, and if you have the energy you can step up that paperthin gargantuan step into it.
likely, more than likely, you won’t even feel the step down on the other side when the little house has faded away for no reason or every reason; your wasteland winter has always been, after all, cabinless.
but for a moment, i say, hardly believing but, for this other person on the couch, speaking with yearning conviction, for a good moment or a long moment or the moment of a blink in a safe space, the other winter will overlay yours. it will be the cabin of a friend’s laugh, or the home of family, or the room where sunshine glimmers, or the spilled light of someone getting a good thing that they deserve (what a gift it is to witness that), or the four walls of a distraction like a card game or a movie, or the structure of a cat’s purr, or the old rattling heater of small validation, or the colourful blanket of something that tastes good, or the floorboards of creating something kind of nice, or the roof of being grateful, or the glittering dust particle or whole foundation of the tiniest and the biggest thing – just anything – that isn’t exactly just what’s left.

if, i would say, not often seeing that cabin in my own wilderness – if the wax paper isn’t taking lines and if the mist holds nothing solid, i hope it sometimes drapes over your winter all the same, just to bring things closer once in a while. can you picture that? just a little less, once in a while. occasionally, a diminished expanse. that’s better, isn’t it? i can believe in that; that’s something i can just about picture: a shrinking of the darkness, if only slightly.
i’ll still say to this person, curled on the couch like i am, remember the cabin. feel no pressure to step into it, no guilt in its absence, but remember it. i may not believe in it myself, but oh – i hope it finds you. i hope it finds you. i hope so much it finds you, even if it’s the only hope i have.