Didn’t I say the winter would be harder?
I thought I saw frost on the road this morning; it must have been what caught me on my bike at the vertex of a turn. The poltergeist of my breath appeared in sinusoidal blooms as I skidded and steadied back onto 5th. I’d appraised the cold as something that could hurt only my bare fingers wound around the metal of their brakes, but never the road’s complexion, its virility. Always we are surprised by the first snap after a languishing summer, though these laws apply to us always.
I’m sorry for being feeble when I met you after work. I felt the silence of my reply abrade what emotional stamina I’d stored away since last night. If only I could reserve that capacity under a cap of lard, up cold against the dead brick wall of a cellar. Wouldn’t it be nice to pry open empathy at will. All I could offer you then, after you spoke, was my fumbled diction and sunsetting gaze. There was loss in your sockets where I should’ve seen the afternoon unfolding.
Sometimes I brush up against a rusted lighter in one of my pockets and find just enough heat lying stagnant in its cheap plastic cage to stoke the appetite for abstraction. The right hour strikes and ignites and from wherever we are we walk to the bar seating of choice to wait for one another, ideas and admissions and inquiries foaming readily, achingly, like fresh taps on the wall. This is sometimes, now. A practice approaching anomalous where four months ago it was axiomatic. Though I will try, certainly; I will exert the work on the system. If I survive the next deluge or the first pitch of black ice, I hope to find you in one of the same old spots. More than that I hope to show up unfrozen, not bad like I can be. Not spoiled to cold core by the insistence of thermodynamics, which sets free precious electrons to be spent in some material grave elsewhere, in another season that doesn’t matter now, doesn’t thrum radically enough to remind you why you sit across from me. Poor posture and a bust knee, thinking what if I’d really skimmed on my bike; would blood have done it? A split bone? How much more of not enough before the energy reverses its order and returns to me, out of sympathy maybe, or for mere kinetic balance, all subatomic motion slow and soft as moon-sent snow. And even then, I wonder if the input could hold the necessary charge. I imagine slinking spine-first into sapphire despair. A chin-high pool beneath the secret trees of the park in wintertime. A cryophilic mirage, erasing the matter with me just as the chill settles prettily into neighbourhood air, no trace left but my mirrored imprint, funnelled through to some black hole out of mind.
Yet for the day we’ve had, it’d be nice to shrug our collars up to our ears and embark on a stroll; tonight just cool enough, an opalescence to the pavement, an evergreen aftershave wind coming in tenderly. I go to get my coat and to call to you from the darkness, but there’s that almost-spill again, this time at my trachea, and I realize I have not the words to ask you.