This winter has had claws, gripping and grasping at me from the beginning.
Although my father died in Autumn and not winter, it began to feel cold even then.
Tonight, I am feverish. A cold wreaks my body for the fourth or so time this winter. My immune system takes the brunt of my mental and emotional agonies, crashing like a kamikazi pilot proud to sacrifice themselves for their country.
My body is the scarred wreckage after martyrdom.
The symptoms are the same as always: soreness, a layer of mucus spreading from my nose to my throat to my lungs, and dizziness. The world is in a near perpetual spin, and the images I see around me are almost halucinations more than memories.
Milestones approach, and I feel my physical weaknesses may alter my reaction to them. February 2nd, my grandmother's birthday. When she died, I refused, in stubborn adolescence, to go to her funeral.
Not burying your dead keeps them inexplicably alive. The memory of a living-dead person is more than apparition but an errand that must be ran. It feels that I'm due at her house for lunch, and I'm running late. I feel anxious and sad, but I'm not sure if I've ever mourned for her.
While my grandmother's birthday approaches, my life marks more notches. Anniversaries come and go--when I first met Tanit, on a cold Delaware night on the third weekend in January. That anniversary passed this year as silence goes, but we're speaking of everyday things now, even while the shadows of our college selves dance around us as we walk through musuem corridors.
And of the now, the fourth of February blossoms into a cup to hold the day I first met J. Three months have passed. This is an affair of processing and compromise...for romance, I hold my breath as the days grow longer, as I train myself not to expect.
Mid-February will find me, once more, after the same four years that have kept Tanit and I in constant movement, in Amsterdam for five days. There, I am certain to find melancholy and memories--my 21 year-old self still very much lost and alone under the coldness of a Dutch winter sky.
This winter has not been easy. These marks and memories and milestones age me closer to that end that comes for all of us.
My body is feverish, so I leave now to fold myself alone into my blankets and sleep. January ends tomorrow. The shortest month of the year begins.