COLD

So it’s winter -- cold, flat, grey, somewhat depressing. The sun shines so brightly that it’s white, blinding and brilliant. It hurts to be sitting out there, I think, glad to be inside if only barely. I lean, shivering, against a pane of glass like ice, chilling me to the bone but pressed against it as if to morph right through and walk away from this place.

I have nothing to escape, am comfortable really. I look, though, search for things that I might be missing. It’s really more of a mental exercise than anything. Staring at landscape of just about any kind simply transfixes me, allows me to free my mind to wander as nothing else does. 

This is what I live for. The few minutes each day that I might evaluate that which I found to have been placed before me. Sometimes I have come to a place on purpose, other times through adventure or error. I am never disappointed.

Whatever I find, I treasure in a way that only I can. Nothing can ever mean the same thing to two different people. The human mind allows for a perception so precise and so very open to interpretation, that the possibilities are infinite and most can not even be imagined. 

The scene before me is brutally bleak, obscured by painful cold and the harsh death of the earth that the gray season brings. How I longed for sun and blue and green, but something here drew me as well.

A traitor to my own deep pleasures, I reveled in the sense of quiet and isolation, devoid of movement, devoid of feeling. Reaching out my hand from my own shivering breast, I touch the glass, first with my fingertips, then with my palm. It shocks me to the shoulder blade, the hot sting of frozen. I have to feel it.

Against the invisible conductor, I shiver gently and am pleased. Is anything ever really there if you don’t feel it?