COLD AIR
Flay me and try on my skin. Tell me how it feels. Try and soften yourself to the cold, lean into currents of air like a liquid. Frigidity does not bother me, I know it well. I invented winter. I am the cold, the quiet, the gusts of wind that you feel through your useless clothes to your bones. When you wear me can you tell?
Slink home through the snowy streets like an ermine. Strip- shirt, slacks, my skin- and crawl into bed. Now, naked, do you feel cold without me for warmth? Let the breeze that slithers in through the slightly open window carry you into a sludge thick sleep. There will be no dreams, no colors, no words.
You could learn to walk like me, drop your voice down so when you whisper it’s at the same smoky frequency as me. Try me on, just to see what it’s like. But you’ll never know all my secrets, even if I tell you one:
I ran into the person who hurt me the other day, he pretended not to see me. Maybe civility is simply above him, maybe he realized what he did to me was subhuman and felt ashamed about it. Probably not though. Nobody ever really learns of their own cruelty: they make excuses for it, recontextualize it with false memories. I’d like to believe he ignored me because my palpable anger frightened him, he could feel it seeping out from beneath my skin. It used to be strong enough to start me from my sleep. When I would lie awake at night enraged, the only thing that soothed me back to sleep was the fantasy of inflicting a slow pain in return. But my anger isn’t why he turned away from me either. I know him. He turned because he had finally pushed the memory of me so far down and acknowledging me then would have instantly undone that hard labor of repression.
So, I win. I burned and cried and the pain I felt is now part of me, crystallized into the softest corners of my body. By making peace with all the arbitrary misfortune of that time of my life, I am armored. He’ll continue to try and forget me, escape the thought of me, though the task is impossible: nothing can be pushed from the surface of the mind without becoming integrated, however quietly, into one’s composition. I was stronger than him all along. For as long as I knew him, he was unrooted: had I exhaled, he’d have blown away. Out of courtesy, I never breathed.
I didn’t realize it until I ran so far away from him so fast that by the time I was out of range I was doubled over and my hollow chest was heaving, screaming for air.
***
Breathless is essentially how I showed up at the end of the year. The first of January crept toward me and as it drew nearer, I’d never felt so relieved to face a conclusion. Before I woke up entirely on the final morning of December, I laid in bed vaguely aware of the world that was beginning to filter in around me. I looked out the window at brilliant cold blue morning light, almost otherworldly, fog opaque, a milky curtain before the treeline. The cedars were hardly visible, tall and skinny and naked. I wish I had a photo of the scene, memory must suffice. The day passed slowly and midnight took its time arriving that night. The year’s final hour lasted five
four
three
two
one.
And just as I had been pacing, waiting for 12:00, I was suddenly laying, waiting for the next sunrise. The middle of the night was leaden with the same silence as the previous blue morning. When dawn and powdery snow collected at last on the lawn, I walked through the door barefoot. Thoughts of the cold did not cross my mind, the sky was clear and no sounds drifted ashore off the lake. If I closed my eyes, it felt like nothing happened. I took a deep breath, the fresh winter cold inflated my lungs.
My life is a cracked mirror. I stare at the hundreds of versions of myself and sometimes they all feel like bad luck. I don’t like to speak about the way last year fractured me because when I try to I feel like pieces of me are escaping, flying out irreversibly into the world. Inexplicably, my self does not fall away when I write. I dissect myself carefully on the page, demonstrating my emotions with patient surgical precision. Here, feel the weight of my heart in your hand, the electricity in its steady pulse. I wish I could hand you the pieces of myself I’ve lost since last new year, but I can’t. The only thing left of them is their memory which I carry with me, but it’ll take some time for me to be ready to present them all. I need to place them in the right context, like artfully constructed museum exhibits of extinct creatures.
You can be haunted by anything if you’re lonely enough to listen for the voices, I’ve found. I’m always waiting for lost parts of myself to howl out at me. When I do hear them is when I really get to missing who I used to be. I dream of disappearing into some faraway corner of the globe, maybe to chase my old innocence, maybe to escape my new self that lives without them. Last time the feeling rocked me awake it was 2am and when I hadn’t fallen back asleep a couple of hours later, I drove to a Greenpoint sidestreet and let myself feel very alone (for which being alone feels like the only real remedy) for a while. A dark winter city offers its own version of companionship. I smile westward and Manhattan glitters back in response, peering over from beyond the low warehouses on this side of the river. My notebook lies open on my lap, I add to my entries. Cursive calms me, the order of it, the beauty. Sometimes when it feels like the world is falling away around me, I thumb through the book and find, there on the page in lacy swirls and dashes, something manageable, familiar, entire. In that little moment, the world exists only in my ink, and there’s no need to run any farther.
Natasha, 21, Brooklyn, NY - USA ✯ IG: @NKG0717