I've not really wanted to reach out to my friends lately. Instead, I find myself wrapping wool around my body, encasing each small bit in a shell of something other-than-flesh. The voices that mark my life so steadily are quieter in these winter months. I move from one section of my life to another, as a shadow moves across a room--creeping and slow, but steadily, as if the destination is not a place I'm traveling to, but a place I've moved away from, and my only goal is not to arrive but to return.

These voices are so many people from my life: my father, my sister, my grandparents, and others not related by blood, but related, still, by the coursing of blood pumping their life into movements that have touched mine.

All these voices, and the stories connecting them to my one solitary voice weigh on me like winter so cold that the concrete is dry ice and the stars glass-cut by diamonds too cold to twinkle.

I'm not really gone in my silences. Instead, I listen and speak, in my turn, of moments that move all the voices to shift within me and become, through the layers, sense.

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