01.24.2003 - 10:17 a.m.

The air is so bitter these days. And normally I would shrink from such an obvious adjective, but clich�s exist in the first place because sometimes they really are the best way to explain things. Cold is just cold, and honestly much easier for me to bear than too much heat, but lately it has been as if the air itself hates me. My hands fumble at the lock on my apartment as I leave for work; Go back, I hear, as if someone were speaking directly into one cringing ear.

My hands are shaking again as I try to unlock my car, and I am dreading the way the cold in the seat will soon claw at the backs of my legs, the way the steering wheel will burn and numb my fingers. I drive with one hand tucked between my thighs, the other practically in my lap, maintaining my contact with the steering wheel with as little skin as possible. My driving gloves are on the passenger seat, but since I never remember to bring them in at night, they are too cold to help me now. My breath swirls. My heater does not work. The car follows the road as if it is driving itself, as if it understands that I am too miserable to guide it.

The river has grown pack ice. Not the whole river�it is too saline for that�but certainly for the thirty or forty feet nearest the shore. The tide is practically out, but you can see the ebb and flow in the piles on the beach and the curving fissures leading out towards the bay; you can see how searingly cold even the water has become.

I love winter. I love winter because of my birthday. I love winter because it is beautiful, because the world is at rest.

I dream of August heat.

-stonebridge

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