Zero Degrees Fahrenheit

The baby cries next door. She hasn't been sleeping well lately; I don't know why. I don't get much sleep myself.

Winter has wrapped its frosty fingers around our necks. The air is painfully cold, the way it kicks itself into your lungs, but there was sun today, and I skipped along the water in bliss. The canal is full of twisted ice, it looks like piles of broken glass, but hopeful. I returned to the apartment with flushed skin, lay in the bath until my toes wrinkled, and discovered new bruises along my thawing body. Sometimes insight appears to you where you were sure it would not. I looked at my face in the mirror last night and saw eyes I did not recognize in it. But so it is with age.

January still soaks me in apathy. I cannot think, cannot feel, cannot plan. I search around my insides for clues, for hints to help me make these decisions but none are to be found. I know there is love, and longing, and agony, and fear within me, but I cannot gauge their frequencies in my chest. The days pass, instead. Today, at the piano, there was the slightest sliver of direct sunlight on the wall. The first direct sunlight into the apartment in months. I sat there and stared straight into it, could not believe my luck.

Winter is like broken glass.
But hopeful.