Such is Life, Such is Life...

a story originally written in autumn of 2019


I told her that I was weaker today, tired today.

I told her that I was not up to the same standard of vigilance.

I won't say I was expecting it when she jumped me; I wasn't, really. It just didn't come as so much of a surprise that I failed to react in time.

And so there I was holding her knife hand in a vice grip, her back against the wall.

"Really? Aren't you tired of these games yet?"

She squirmed and fought, but she fought half-heartedly. The chains I had built around her did not permit free movement and hurt to struggle too hard against. She was forced either to be caught in an obvious lie, or to concede the truth although it weakened her strength.

She confessed that I had not provoked her attack. It was her responsibility, it was her fault. She was the instigator. But she was angry at me. Perhaps nearly as angry as she was at herself.

Had I raped her? A demon bound to service does not serve willingly, so had I raped her? Maybe. As much as it may also be claimed that she seduced me... or that what bound us were more like wedding vows. Or that to take any single option thoroughly out of another man's capability is to imprison him.

Our world is not one in which such all or nothing ideals can yield useful judgements. To a high enough eye, all love has conditions no matter how well-intentioned, all conditions are coercion... And so if sex under coercion is rape, surely I had raped her, as all us hairless apes guilty of loving one another have been traumatized rape victims who go on to perpetrate, since the moment our species's behaviour first met whatever conditions the observer chooses to sufficiently qualify what we do as love.

Perhaps, to some eyes, we are not even there yet.

I was angry. I was frustrated. But more simply, I was tired. I had broken down and cried twice the previous day. I had thrown up sour juices from my belly and spat them out. I was tired of holding her so tightly, watching her so closely that she couldn't attack me.

But I was not so tired that she would beat me. Even tired, I was too fast for her. I could see in ways that the wounded creature was blind, too paralysed by fear to reach far enough out to touch that thing which cannot be seen with light nor sound nor nerves, but that required something else to sense. Something subtler, something that required some of the absence of fear.

Her attack was clumsy to me. I was tired, and did not enjoy the task of restraining her. But what must be done must be done. I grumbled. I will admit I kicked her ego while she was down. I was in a bad mood. She threw at me an argument, a package of words, which unfolded into an entrapping net of meaninglessness.

Still feeble before me. I had seen this kind of net before. I did not even sidestep. I walked through it, and I held her chin. I spoke into her face, up very close, and I explained. Her net was like a mist to me. I had had my turn being entangled in such nets before. I had learned long ago how to wriggle out of it, how to avoid being caught in the first place.

She spoke with quiet words that I had freed myself perhaps, but had not saved her. Behind the front of her words, she was crying and shrieking to be freed from her own net, but she could not have seen that she was, with her sense blinded by fear. The key was in her possession, but she had forgotten how to find it and did not know how to use it. I showed it to her, guided her hand to the right pocket, and opened it with the key inside. She looked at the thing blankly.

I told her she could use it, that she could figure it out.

"No. I refuse."

"I see what you are doing. You are trying to scare me away so I'll let you die. I also refuse."

She cried then, and she cursed me, helpless before my power over her, pitiable in her helplessness. Such is the nature of things bound. One cannot help but resent one's captor. I know I cannot in fairness expect her but to lay on my shoulders every scrap of suffering she lives while I bind her to life and force her to endure.

And so, had I raped her? Had it perhaps been time, and long since time to not bind but trust her? But sex was one thing, and one thing I could do without.

If she died, if I undid the chains and lifted the geas that guaranteed her from taking that knife to herself and then she did, it would stay with me forever until the memory was destroyed along with the rest of me.

Was I in my guardianship truly worthy of any other thanks but her contempt for keeping her here, in a beating heart and the raggedness of her sobbing breaths?

I do not have the comfort of conviction that I am doing the right thing. I am not actually certain. But for now, I continue to hold her here. It is the best I dare to do. In my own fear, my senses are clouded, although less so than hers. I cannot see a way to heal her without holding her to life, no matter how unwilling. If I could put her into a sleep until I have the answers, perhaps I would...

But in truth, I am glad to be spared the decision to choose between my own deepest loneliness, and forcing her to endure waiting for a cure that neither of us know is coming, that neither of us really know is possible.

Such is life, I suppose.

Such is life.

Blood

If you're someone who's likely to be disturbed by blood, menstruation, sex or complicated questions about gender, it would probably be better not to read this one. Have a good day.

An aggravating feeling of helpless rage at the smugness of an authority that doesn't give a damn about anything I say and has power over me through the very nature of the systems of which our world is built, the only allies against it very far away and unable to intervene to help me in my present, and for all I know unable or too busy to intervene before I run out of time and die.

Seems familiar.

I have, for the last hour or so, been holding an internalized mental argument... with an anthropomorphic personification of human evolution. And feeling increasingly like a sulky, powerless teenager under its authority.

-----

I woke up this morning covered in blood, soaked through the sheet under me, into the mattress, all over my loins and thighs. Grumbled to my feet and wrapped in a towel and tried to get to the bathroom to clean off without leaving drops of blood on the hall carpet. I had made my regular preparations for my period, it's not like this came out of nowhere and I wasn't expecting anything. But what the hell? Usually those steps are enough.

Wash my legs, empty my cup, clean the little drops off the bathroom floor (at least that just wipes clean) and come back to my room to strip my bloody sheet off my bed in a cold room stinking richly of copper and rust. Laundry earlier than expected, then. I don't have any spares. Sad regret at not following through on my thought to buy another mattress protector when I started using the first one I bought as a blanket against the growing cold followed me to school. I can't expect the next unknown tenant to be willing to sleep on a bloodstained bed, so it's only fair after this to put some of my deposit towards replacing the mattress, which is a punch to my sensitive budget awareness. I know better than this, and the cost of buying the second mattress protector would be so much less. But I just hadn't gotten around to it. Too many other priorities too intensely felt. Too late now.

Well, at least I did put myself to bed early and got what should be a reasonable enough amount of sleep to function well at school. But in class, it took not only an energy drink but the engagement of an actual exercise to perform to keep me from repeatedly closing my eyes and realizing after a while that I hadn't opened them and was paying more attention to my desire for more sleep than the lecture. On the upside, I guess, it's familiar material that was covered by my Cost Accounting class at Fanshawe, and didn't require much mental presence to use as review rather than new learning.

And while I sat in class, warmth leaked into my underwear and jeans in little blossoms. I could feel it. What the hell, seriously? It's only a half hour walk, and only an hour of class. School bathroom, emptied my cup again and looked over the damage. Mhm. Stained the patches on my jeans. Well, that's fresh enough it might wash out if I deal with it before it dries. And if not, well, I was kind of planning on re-patching them anyway. Damn, though. I don't usually have heavy periods, and this is insanely fast. One of my old friends used to tell me about how heavy her periods usually are, and I was glad I didn't have to deal with it. This sounds like what she told me. I don't think it's a medical emergency, but it's really weird for me.

Feeling exhausted, scarcely better than on Monday when I hadn't slept at all, after a morning headache I attributed to dehydration from blood loss (and seemed to be validated, since drinking lots of water really helped). I felt and feel drained in a way that seems profoundly more literal than usual, and responded as I had on Monday by returning home to rest, frustrated intensely at the impact on my attendance in classes.

As I walked, I wondered why my body was investing so much into conception this month, such that it was leaving me deprived of strength for other things, like actually being restored by sleep and being awake in class. I reflected that all the masculinity and determination I pulled up yesterday and that wonderful feeling of swagger and confidence just couldn't seem to be supported on a body spending so much of its strength to wash out and replenish a womb, which was not made for battle. I felt I would like to be able to talk to the part of me that regulated that and ask it what the deal was, why the investment, and if I could have some kind of warning if this was going to happen again.

Well, I hadn't been expecting this to develop, but my imagination is vibrant and has a lot of material to draw from.

The personification looks back at me with patronizing eyes.

"You get all pumped up on passion and infatuation and don't expect to conceive. Just like you, Upstart Consciousness, thinking you run everything now, decide everything. I made those feelings, and getting you pregnant is what I made them for.

"You can co-opt the feelings, sure, like you've harnessed everything else. Do what you like, Upstart. I can't and won't stop you. But when you take the infrastructure I spent twenty years building into your very flesh, and millions in practicing, and you try to make something completely different out of it, don't come complaining to me that my lust, my affection and instincts of family-forming and the elation of compatibility that I gave you have side-effects that mess up pieces of whatever weird deviating program you're trying to build with them. De-bug your own mess.

"Silly Upstart. Always wanting the best of everything, without its costs.

"I specialized you to be a garden, rich and fertile. You don't want to plant anything there, fine. But this blood is not meant for you, Upstart Consciousness. It was meant for the children you refuse to have."

And I stare and sit and sulk, enraged at the determinism of my weave and my flesh to anything other than my will. An authority I have no greater established authority to appeal to for overturn. I wonder to myself whether this personification of the very manufacture of me gets its attitude of distant, smug and hateful authority from my mother (the flesh person from whom I directly descend, rather than the long process of descent which is no less my mother), or maybe the other way around. Was this always a part of it? Was this far more a part of my utter intolerance for her than I ever suspected, a hatred that I was built with a body made for childbearing when I wanted to fight and lead?

Confusion and despair and uncertainty. There are times, although as befits the bitter teenager feeling, I may resentfully resist admitting it at the moment, when that purpose flows through me red and alluring. I feel the heat of it and my body's response. Lust craves in me pointedly to be sewn and swollen with fertility, but I revolt and hold my ideals against the impulse, valuing quality of life over quantity and understanding them to be in conflict. I will side with quality, no matter what my biology has to say about it. But deep in my sex drive, I know it is there in all of my femaleness.

Do I hate that? Is that why all of sex seems like rape to me sometimes, in that vague and imprecise close-but-not-quite way? That the ways in which my body is designed to enjoy it seem like an imposition to me, a drug woven into my flesh, a manipulation I cannot escape and a tool to subvert me as an individual, as Upstart Consciousness which thinks that Consciousness ought to rule the world; like the systems of pleasure exist to demur me and not just me specifically, not just Serp, but "me", the concept of being an individual and having self-determination, demur "me" to submit my time and life energy to being part of the biological process, a cog in the machine of flesh and procreation. A stitch in the fabric of generations, to bond and spread its spoor and die and be eaten, digested by plants and returned to the newborns in their day as fruit.

I want more for myself, for all selves as my loves and inspirations remind me. Does this revolt then, this rebellion, seep in bitterness and conflict right down, down, through my muscles and organs and neurons, into a hatred of the very attraction of sex, the hunger and preoccupation and the pleasure it offers to reward me for doing obediently as my body says? Made disgusting by a rejection of blind obedience on principle, a hatred of all the flaws and all of the victims enabled by the processes of just taking your pay, or endorphins, or promotion, and not thinking about whether what you're being paid to do is good. Could that conviction, revulsion, really be at the core of my longstanding recoil against, shame about, not exactly sex, but the love of and desire for sex?

Maybe.

I hadn't considered it before, but at first appraisal, it seems to make a lot of sense. The distaste and shame are still there, after all, after every kind of mental exercise and argument I could think of against kink shaming and slut shaming, after rejecting and rejecting again repeatedly as not having any right to determine my feelings every mote I could find of religious shame, of mere fear-of-judgement, of anything else. But there was some root that none of it has shifted. Is this that root?

My plans for the day had more to do with study and less to do with uncovering dysphoria hidden deep in my psyche, but hey, I'll take it. I will almost never refuse an opportunity to understand myself better.

The Rainbow

It's been a while since I've come back to write here, but maybe it hasn't been as long as it feels like. For a while I was thinking from time to time I should come back just to mention that the heartbreak is fading and although the challenge of trying to get by here on the budget I have available for it is a big one, I think I'm getting more of a handle on it.

A couple of weeks ago, I think on the day I last wrote, now that I think of it, I applied to Rev after looking through some articles on more unconventional ways to make money, as opposed to a regular hired job. Rev is a captioning and transcription service and work space; they hire freelancers who can use the online tools they provide to claim jobs as they come available and type captions to videos and audio from clients. I went through some testing and was approved to join.

It's been exciting to have something I could do with my hours from home to make money on my own terms, and although I'm not currently earning at a rate which is going to solve all my financial problems, it's work that I like and I think I can get better at it over time.

Yesterday just for example I wrote captions for a weird music video, and started work on an hour-long documentary I'll need to finish today. I get exposed to a lot of different media I probably would never have watched on my own, and the variety makes this job interesting. I'm glad to have something that takes advantage of my precision with words and good typing speed, although in this case, it's precision in listening to hear exactly what words someone else used, not choosing them myself.

As often happens, I've found solace in love from those around me by deepening my relationships into romance. There's a degree to which I feel uncomfortable about that, since it's happened so many times before it feels like I'm turning predictable or something, becoming a cliche. It's frustrating that that meta-awareness messes with my appreciation of the moment, because the thing itself is beautiful anyway.

So once again I've had a wonderful time talking endlessly to one of my friends and finding that there is potential for us to be closer, and it was all appropriately delicious. I've drawn a few pictures, hit by inspiration from the new relationship energy and finding with pleasure that the skill I've accumulated over the years makes it much easier for me to depict what I want to reasonably well, and I've been producing work I can be proud of in just a couple of hours.

The thought to see if I can try to market that as well does come to mind, alongside the long-standing intent to try to set up an online shop for my macrame bracelets. The way things are going so far, it'd make me an all-around crafter-freelancer, and you know what? That could be pretty cool.

Sunday night this week I pulled an all-nighter hanging out online with this relationship that's changing colours in my life, and so yesterday I had trouble staying awake in my classes. I gave up and went home to sleep after the first two. I slept again last night, although not ideally long, and walked to school today listening to a variety of renditions of "The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond". There was one instrumental version in particular that I reflected would sound just about perfect if I could have added the sound of rain into it, for an atmospheric connection to the sky and fields as they are, I suppose.

Well here's where it gets a bit strange, because not five minutes later it started raining. I'd finished the song by then, but the timing was remarkable anyway. I had been admiring the many colours of silver in the clouds, as there often are in Ireland, and it's not as though it seemed unlikely for it to rain, but just that it happened right then, as opposed to fifteen minutes earlier, struck me as somewhat uncanny.

But what was moreso was when I looked up and almost jumped to see the change in the sky; where there hadn't been not five minutes before when I took a photo of the lovely silvers in the clouds over the green field I was passing, there was a rainbow, full across the sky and not the slight half-bow I'd sometimes seen in rain in Canada.

Over the next little while, the rainbow got brighter and brighter by the moment, not only a full arc across the sky now, but apparent right to the ground on both sides, even casting its colours in front of the distant hills on the horizon. It looked as though you could have guessed to within a dozen meters or so where exactly it seemed to touch down on one side. Looking on with awe, some of the old legends of searches for leprechauns' gold made a lot more sense all of a sudden.

For a period of not more than ten minutes or so, the rainbow brightened and brightened, clearer and more vibrant than I had ever seen a rainbow in my life, with a second, dimmer arc beginning to show outside the main on the sides, and then began to dim and fade away. I caught a few photos of the rainbow before it was gone, and the sky returned to gray as the rain continued lightly for a while longer and I went on my way toward the college. The whole of its appearance may have been contained in a quarter of an hour.

I thought back to King of Dragon Pass where the appearance of a rainbow was considered to be among the best of omens, and to other similar things, and felt rather a lot as though the sky had smiled at me, 'like forgiveness' in a way, I remember thinking. There's a certain cheshire-cat-ness to it now, looking back, that leaves me feeling curious and portentous. Perhaps it smiles on the progress of my new relationship, or to reassure me that my efforts are good enough, for now; or that I may be soon rewarded for not giving up on my time here. Who knows, but there is that in me that wonders, even while its being silly and seeming misguided is also felt in my thoughts.

So there, anyway, is the rainbow which greeted me this morning, and the trend of my activities these past few weeks. Health and fortune to the ones I love and to all those who love me, if I may spread it out to them, for their fortune is also mine after all.

And good day.

Dear Memory: The Games You Play

Hi, Eoin.

I feel very close to you today, dear memory. I have been listening to your voice. It has been... over five months, I think... since the last time I listened to your voice, and that sound, so familiar, carries an amazing weight of nostalgia now.

I know you must be doing okay, for now, because you're part of a podcast now. Maybe later, I will come back and add a hyperlink to it into this post, but not yet. Not today. I'm a little afraid that you'd see the back-link somehow, and find me here, watching you, and that that would make you uncomfortable. So as much as I would love for you, for this person you are now, your voice still familiar, your jokes told with the same friendly sass... but not to me... As much as I might love to see you turn and see me watching you, I do not rustle the branches. I stay quiet and hidden and permit you not to be any more likely to notice me than you already are, for I've posted links to my blog sometimes on Facebook and I think once, the preview line visible from there held your name.

It's so good to hear you laughing again. And Gearoid and Troy, too. I miss hanging out at your house, listening to you banter with them like this, at home and happy and comfortable. I miss listening to you talk about the games you love, and shows you love, and things you do. I hope I will one day be welcome again to stand awkwardly at hand, listening. Trying sometimes to find something to contribute by saying. Even feeling self-consciously out of place there, but still allowed to be there, listening, enjoying the stories... and talking to you about them afterwards.

Maybe someday I will play games with you again. I hope so. You're so fun-loving. It's... relaxing just being around that, sometimes. It... was, I mean.

While looking through Steam today after nabbing a game which was released for free as an anniversary promotion, I stumbled across something I had remembered only dimly for some time. The Beginner's Guide... And I remember, like vision, like the physical world coming back as a dream fades. I remember sitting and laying on your bed and exploring it, rapt with attention. I remember the prison cell which ostensibly would originally have trapped the player for hours. I remember the trick-door which kept coming back or something, although I'm not sure I remember the trick to it. I remember three figures with blank faces, asking questions about how I got there, and how to move forward. I remember a huge room full of bubbles with comments in them. I remember a combination lock without any clues to the combination. I remember a man standing at a podium. I remember a red curtain around a stage, and a gun which shattered the scenery into blank whiteness... I remember a house full of little things to fix. Little chores to keep up, maintenance to be done. I remember liking that part. It seemed... peaceful.

I remember sitting with you and speaking aloud back at the narrator about the point I thought he'd missed. I remember... rising above the maze. Do you know, Fish...? I still keep that screenshot among my wallpapers. And whenever I see it, I think of you.

I listened to your podcast while I took a long walk today, and bought some ramen. Many times, I laughed at your jokes. Not just yours, Eoin, I mean Troy's and Gearoid's too. I'm glad you're okay. I'm glad you're talking about things that you love. I'm glad that I can listen to your voice without getting in your way. If you keep doing this, then there may be a way that I can have your good humour and your cheeky cleverness in my life even if you don't want to talk again when I land.

When I land. Dear memory... I haven't written this here yet. But last week, I got my first offer of placement back from an Irish college. Dear memory, the only condition set out in that offer is that I successfully finish my diploma and hand in my transcript by May 30th. Dear memory, I don't even have to get good marks in my classes, I only have to pass them. Dear memory...

I am coming.

I hope I will get more than one offer. I hope I will have a reason to contact you and ask which one I ought to choose, a lapse in the silence that's existed between us for more than five months. But even if this is the only choice I am given... I am coming. It's gone from "hope" and "maybe" and "trying" to something more solid.

The day after I received the email, I woke up in my bed, and squirmed gradually to consciousness, and my first conscious thought was to repeat, in my mind, I could buy my plane ticket today. I'm going to Ireland. Where to head after I land may not be set in stone, but I have my confirmation now. There is at least one answer available to that question. I'm going to Ireland. Coming to Ireland. I'm coming back, and I'm coming for you. It sings in my heart so intensely it turns almost to a shriek when I think about it. Like a perfect tone, sweet and high and pure and so loud it could shatter glass.

There is still much to be done first, but the greatest hurdle, the most doubtful issue has been cleared. The rest is details. Details which will fill my days, my nights, my schedule, until mid-August.

And this is why I felt it was now an acceptable time to look through your Facebook page again, and see a couple sorta recent pictures. And I found your new podcast there, and I've been listening to it. It's close enough now, somehow. It doesn't feel distant and stalkery the same way it did once before, because I expect I may have cause to actually be in touch within just another two weeks.

It all comes down to this... and now I hear you laughing and joking with your friends, just like you used to. And something in me that had worried that you might be somehow a very changed person now, someone less likely to like me... something of that fear melts away. You will very likely have changed somehow... but you laugh the same. In your most recent pictures on Facebook, your smile is as I knew it before I left. That's Eoin alright. And that's something right about the world. Something happy. Right now, it must be night time in Ireland, though it's yet early evening here. Goodnight, Eoin. May you rest healthfully and wake happy. I love you.

Dear Memory: Still Working On It

Dear Eoin...

I have been writing less often, and directing my thoughts here toward you less often when I do. I think the period of intense heartbreak and missing you since the last time I heard your voice in October is pretty much done.

However, my peace lies twined with my plans. I have unpacked the things I call my "shrine", symbols and trinkets that I like to keep together and revere as little treasures. The red bull, the antique horn, a musical jewelry box which holds some stones and jewelry... And my skull candle, my oath candle. I have contemplated it with happiness. A few years ago, I burned this candle hollow, so that a pillar's worth of wax ran out and left its eye sockets and nose hollow, just as a skull is meant to be, and stared intently at it for hours as it burned, making a promise to myself, in a desperate and unhappy circumstance, that if I continued to be unhappy where I was, I would move. Put another way, that same promise could be phrased, "follow your dreams".

It gives me peace and happiness to look on it, because I know I have not forgotten the promise. I keep my oath to myself. For my joy, and my health, if I find I am not content with where I am, I will change it.
I think the wax shell is probably too delicate in its hollowness to bring across the sea. I am thinking that before I go, I will seek an opportunity to burn the rest of it in a fire, and re-confirm with the destruction of my oath candle the same promise that made it what it is.

I am still planning to come to you, although you come into my thoughts less often. The intent to go back to Ireland is always close at hand there. I am committed to it so thoroughly that the idea no longer seems at all unusual to me. The processes are perhaps a bit daunting, and of course it will cost me more than studying in Canada, but there is much at Fanshawe to help prepare me. I will probably need to work part-time while studying. It's something I have made a point of avoiding in my studies in Canada, but when it comes to bringing myself to Ireland... If this must be a part of my plan, for it to work out financially, it will be, and that is that.

I was so excited to meet the representatives of Limerick, Sligo, Carlow and Tralee. One of them was named Eoin, too. I must have suppressed a sad smile when I recognised the name and was able to pronounce it at a glance. There is a little workshop next week as well about procedures related to studying at a foreign college.

This morning, I came in to the school library and sat down to read and study my Cost Accounting material. I put on music from TouHou and wrote down many phrases and sentences from the material in my schoolwork related cardcast decks. It was a bit of a distraction, and no doubt slowed my reading. However, the music was so appropriate for background music while focusing that as I was packing up to get some breakfast, it was with some odd surprise that I realized turning off my laptop would require me to stop listening to it (since that is what I had playing the music). It was as though the TouHou tracks had been accepted as just what life sounded like on some level.

From that early morning on to late evening, I have been busily tending to one thing and then another... I was exhausted and barely taking anything in by the time my last class ended (it is the latest in the day of any of my classes). However, there were some fun highlights. The professor makes Google Documents and shares an editing link with the students; we pour in, over a dozen of us, and start building something there. Seeing it come together in several pieces at once like that, some formatting, some writing... It reminds me a bit of ants, in a good way.

If you were to wonder of me, I wish I could tell you that I still love you, and with this strength of mine, I will come to find you. I will be healthy and hearty as I can be.

You never read the Discworld books, I think, but... There's one character in them, a Mr. Carrot who has been in various books corporal, sergeant and eventually I think captain in the nightwatch. He is an immigrant, a human (by blood) who had been raised by dwarves, and his defining characteristic is that he believes so strongly in the good nature of people that they can't bring themselves to disappoint him and act more nobly and honestly than they do around anyone else.

At one point, he and a bunch of the other watchmen are aboard a ship in a storm at sea, chasing after someone who has kidnapped Angua, the woman he loves, also a member of the watch. The others had expected that he would be sick and restless worrying about her, but in the hours before they expected to land, Carrot was soundly sleeping with such determination that even the fierce tossing of the storm could not wake him. Since, as he had said, if he arrived in an exhausted state he'd be useless to actually help the woman he loved.

I feel kind of like that about you. Not that you are in need of rescue of course. Just... I want to be stronger for you and not weaker. I want to be better for every influence you have on me and not worse. You deserve that.

My Season

I wrap my heart in a net and throw it out to a vast sea.

I walk, with an uneven gait, favouring one leg over the other. Snow flies out before the toes of my boots in little powder waves. Powder water, cold and dry. I scoop up the top of a bank experimentally, clench it together. It falls apart as I open my hand. Yes. Very dry. Cold, dry water.

I smile viciously, savouring the darkness of the sky, the constant texture of the falling snow through it. The struggle of snow, shifting softly under my boot with each step of an uneven gait, favouring one leg over the other. It parts or compresses readily, and my boot comes down further. It resists, a packed clump more solid, and I slow to drag my body over the momentary obstruction. Sloughing powder snow away with my boots, I feel slightly like a sea turtle, dragging itself across wet sand. I feel a little like something like a horse and something like a bird. A chocobo, maybe? I smile viciously at the sky. I feel at home.

The snow is deep, at least a foot of simple fall and stacked up much higher where it has been pushed to the side to leave mere inches slowly accumulating under the unceasing fall, diagonal texture, dry water.

I took pictures of it, at my porch this morning, at the campus before I left. This is the picture of real winter as I know it, wild and troublesome and inconvenient. This is my season. It is cold, but the wind is not harsh, and it is not too cold. If you step out into it, and you expect it to be cold, then it is... but like water at the beach, if you expect it to be cold, and step into it anyway, you can quickly become used to it.
Or at least, I can.

Hunger reaches up across my chest like a wooden brace that I press against by walking forward. I feel the pressure and smile viciously. It is a part of the season. Dark night, falling snow, walking made more effortful by shifting pressures and uncertain hold. I pick my feet up and sprint for a short ways, grinning. There is ice in my hair. I am listening to Welcome to Night Vale. It is a particularly good episode, and the ending credits cease just as I am turning down the driveway of my house. A walkway has been carved out, and shoveled bare recently. I suppose I should feel grateful. But what's true is that I will be glad to leave this place. There are many places I have left, and been glad to leave, in my life. But then again, there are a precious few that I have left, but have pointedly not been glad to leave.

It took me about 50 minutes to walk home. I considered taking the bus, as I walked out of the campus doors. It was close at hand, just filling up with students as I reached it. It was packed and crowded inside, with still more students hoping to board it. I have a strong preference not to be crowded. I made my way through the crowd and past it with little hesitation. I walked home, smiling, sometimes laughing at my podcast. I smiled viciously at the sky and let my mind wander, let my self imagine the shape and perspective of different creatures as they came to me.

I enjoyed my day, those parts of it in which I was doing something, clawing life out of fatigue. I paused at the door of my house, and shook my backpack, and brushed small piles of snow off of my headphones and jacket. I stepped inside, to toasty warmth. It seemed too warm. It smelled of warmth in a way that I cannot identify with any other smell. The remaining bits of snow immediately began to melt as I came down to my room. My pantlegs are damp. My socks are damp. My ankles are itchy. I pick little shells of ice off of my hair, and set down my backpack, and take off my jacket, and hang it up to dry.

I filter the rest of the ice out of my hair with my hairbrush, overcoming stubborn resistance, embracing every detail, preparing to sit and relate this story, which I fully expect to seem wild and rambling. It is meant to seem wild and rambling. It should not worry you, if you read it. It does not worry me. I am happy to allow myself, for a while, to be wild and rambling. The weather outside is a face of true winter and I am home. It is too hot inside. I laugh to myself, and begin typing.

The words and the images as I had thought them while I was walking come readily back to mind with just a little prompting.

I am a little inspired by Welcome to Night Vale. I have been enjoying it. The episode that was ending just as I turned in to the driveway of my house was A Story About Them, set sometime in 2014 of the story's timeline. On this day, I particularly appreciate the weather.

Drifting in Snow; The Season of the Scavenger

Eoin weighed particularly heavy on my mind today. I went walking in the first snow of the year that I have seen. It was beautiful, and I was happy to stay out in the cold until some areas of my skin began to feel slightly numb.
I had wanted to send him pictures when the real snows came.
Pictures of winter as it is in Canada.

There was a particular street, where streetlamps positioned between pairs of trees offered a gorgeous image that I felt, if I had the materials, I should like to paint. The bare, arching branches curled over the top of the sidewalk, giving it the beautiful natural-tunnel look of paths between trees, but the light cast the trees against one another in alternating light and shadow; the light in front of every second tree so that its part was cast in beige, and behind the others, so that their trunks and branches were dark silhouettes, and layered like that; light, dark, light, dark, light... Giving the path's length gorgeous texture in contrast.

A friend asked me what was my favourite part of winter.

I don't think I have a favourite part, per se. I prefer cooler temperatures, and so I appreciate that winter is a season in which I am not likely to feel overheated. I often tend to see seasons, much as I see other things, in the things they symbolise. Winter is endings, death and rebirth, rest and repose, the elegance of the lifeless and the dangerous beauty of unforgiving forces of nature, such as ice and snow.
It may also stand for austerity, the time when nothing grows being a natural time of scarcity, but humankind in this country is now divorced from such things.
I suppose I see it as the difficult season, and that appeals to my need to be challenged and face adventure.
In much the same way, spring represents birth and renewal, autumn represents change and shares the motif of endings with winter, and the motif of plenty and harvest with late summer.
Spiritual symbolism. I do it.

Winter speaks to me of wandering, which touches me more and seems to me less obvious.
But it is an ancestral symbol, too. When nothing grows, predators hunt and prowl, wandering farther from their homes to find sustenance.
Humankind are predators, and do so as well.
It is the time when scarcity may force conflict, and unwelcomeness shows its ugliest face; some may be cast out to freeze or starve if they cannot make their own way.
For both of these reasons, perhaps, it feels like the season of the wanderer and the outsider, that one who must always seek and cannot be satisfied for long with what it finds, for even as today's hunger is satisfied, there is always again tomorrow's empty belly to fill as well.
Of course, this time of difficulty is marked with revelry and defiance once we make it through a significant enough chunk to feel we have some measure of victory.
Hardship brings joy at overcoming it.

I certainly identify with the symbols of the wanderer and the scavenger, so in a way I feel that this is my season. The cold is a welcome discomfort to me, a connection to the sense that this cold North land is my home, and a little challenge which makes weathering it more satisfying...
There is nothing quite like coming in out of a harsh cold.