Cold

When I was young, it was warmer. One-hundred and six, one-hundred and five, one-hundred and nine—the whole twelve-day forecast went on like that in the summers. They said you could cook an egg on a car dash. My parents never let me try that. Still, they did stretch and strain themselves financially to make sure we had an excellent swimming pool growing up, so they weren’t totally adverse to hot-weather fun.

Now, it is cold. It is January, and I am far from the scorching valley where I grew up. The wind has teeth today, thin and sharp. My eyelids crackle with pain. Under their gloves, my hands are still shivering.

It is a long and lonely city in this cold. People look at their feet so that they don’t face the wind. They shrink into themselves; if they become sufficiently compact, they surely reason, perhaps not a single mote of warmth will be lost. But it’s for nothing. If there was a heat map, the reds and yellows of their bodies would be going gradually blue.

They are faceless, with their masks and scarves and beanies. Cut off from me by thick currents of wind and cold, they are strangers. We all make our way separately, like ants belonging to different anthills.

It must be that I romanticize, it must be that I remember wrongly; but it seems that, when I was young, the currents between us were not so thick. Didn’t it used to be that the people walked there, and you walked here, but, still, you passed each other and dealt with each other? I remember being small and shy and not wanting to meet anyone, but there were always people to meet.

Now? It is exactly as my childhood self would have had it. Our eyes skim over one another. We shrink into ourselves and bear the wind, not like a team of artic explorers, clasping arms, but like snowflakes coming down on warm pavement: individual, alone, and brief in our passing.

When I was young, it was warmer. Now, it is cold.