Winter in My Heart

I like October. I love autumn, of course, but I enjoy Halloween specifically. I like the otherworldliness that seems to descend upon the atmosphere. I like the thrill of unfounded fear, the things that make your heart pound but you know they won’t really hurt you. The dark unknown that prickles the back of your neck when there’s nothing behind you and the twisted faces of some primal fear contrived into physical forms that can be escaped if you run fast enough or if you stay very, very still and if they catch you…nothing happens. For one day a year I like looking into the painted face of play-pretend darkness, all dressed up with bright colors and sugar; a twenty-four-hour-long parade making a mockery of evil. It’s a day made from the vibrant scraps of everything in the world that people have vomited back up on themselves. There’s an intensity to it that I appreciate, an intensity like the post-apocalyptic dreams I’ve been having lately. I suppose you could call them nightmares.

When it was still September I dreamed peacefully. I dreamed that we walked by the sea, and that’s all that really happened. We walked in the blue cast of dusk, but the sand was still warm from the sun. The tide was low in my dream, the waves calm and lapping. They slid up on the shore like so many layers of frost-edged glass. We were supposed to have met earlier, but I spent too much time looking for a certain blouse.

I dreamed we walked by the sea, and that’s all that really happened.

But November’s coming, and December after that. Almost time for wasteful winter, tiny ice crystals brilliant glinting intricate artistry and oh so soon turned to sludge. God, why do You waste the snowflakes? Each masterpiece tossed to the ground to melt away. Melt like everything that was before; like time dripping from the hands of our clocks as the seasons change. They say that the tracking of time was man’s invention and yet the universe goes on marking it all the same no matter whose idea it was, with weather patterns and the aging of the things of earth.

You say you’re excited for the cold to come, and you really must be; you haven’t seen winter for a while now. But it’s only been a few months for me, and I can’t say I miss it yet. It must be winter in my heart though; it’s barely autumn and already I can feel a chill in the bones of my fingers and toes. A chill that creeps and stays and all the socks and gloves in the world won’t help because it is inside, in the deepest parts, in the marrow. In the core.

Like the core of the earth all safe and protected, all crusted with lithosphere and asthenosphere. If I touched that core, would the earth flinch? Would the entire world recoil from my prodding finger with a steaming hiss of pain? Or would it bite back, crushing my hand between two tectonic plates? Because that’s always where it hurts the most: the center, the heart of things. All soft and red and raw, nerve endings exposed and delicate veins just beneath the fleshy membrane, vulnerable and so ready to bleed.

I do like having my heart wrenched in little ways, though: books, movies, songs. I like being made to feel things, and abstract heartbreak is just so deliciously haunting I can’t help but love it even as tears fill my eyes.

I like being made to feel things; just not cold. Anything but cold.


.