Deep Blue

Yesterday I wrote a piece that I really liked, but I felt like it needed work. It started off like this..

The light this morning when I woke up was such a beautiful deep blue. It was nice to look through the window and not see the bare branches of the trees. Even though I think you only get this kind of blue in winter, it was nice to pretend it might be another season. One where the thaw had begun to set in and the tips of the branches were covered in fuzzy pods ready to produce bright green leaves. The end of winter is still far into the future. We have at least two months. New York is so filthy right now. New York is always dirty but you can get a sense of all the grime that is buried when you see it against the stark contrast of the snow. It’s nearly black in high traffic areas, reminding us all of where exactly it is we live.

I thought my descriptions of the city were ok. So I tried another.

Nothing can stop the city however and our silent polar landscape quickly falls back into its normal routine. We pray for a warm day to melt the snow but this year, the low temperatures have extended into weeks and so the city resembles a garbage dump with trash bags teetering on top of hard drifts, the snow blackened by the soot of car exhaust. It is like a charcoal drawing, started and then cast aside, revealing on its page the hard contrast of grime against the soft white of winter.

I thought of a magic wand reanimating the city. Bringing it back to life after the storm.

But I couldn’t get back to that place in my heart. The spot where I was when I sat in the chair staring out the window at that deep blue of daybreak.

Then I began to think a lot about the snow as it fell.

I whisper a lullaby and fall to me knees in a drift. I can’t help myself. When I look up there is a woman standing behind me and I wonder why she is there. You can never have alone time in New York. It just doesn’t exist.

In the city it’s hard to find space.

I was off on a tangent. Thinking about the romance of a snowstorm. And then I began to think of the astronaut who was stuck in space for nine months. I would lose my mind. It makes me think of people who live in the cold year around. How do they not go mad?

Winter is a time for madness. If you’re not careful it can carry you away

Winter is isolating.

I began to think of my own downward spiral when I was young and it was winter.

This is that time of year where you start to feel stretched. Like your mind might want to let go. Catapult itself from your skull and soar through the air with the ferocity and speed of a meteor. I think of the deranged character, Renfield, in Werner Herzog’s version of Nosferatu laughing hysterically in his cell.

I keep thinking of a cold martini in a dark bar.

My husband and I spoke about how you hear different in the winter. He is a sound engineer. Then I ask him if in the winter he feels like you see different too? I thought about a mirage in a desert.

I began reading Slaughter House-Five this morning by Kurt Vonnegut. There is a part of the book that goes like this. It is Billy Pilgrim talking about how the Tralfamadorians view time.

“ The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and then can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”

It made me want to cry. It’s nice to think of people you love still thriving somewhere in time.

I said to my husband. I’m feeling very angsty today and he began to tell me about the powerful solar flares currently being unleashed by the sun. He said it wouldn’t be unusual for them to be affecting how we felt. I nodded. I feel very vulnerable.

It’s 5:54 pm and it’s pitch black outside. I feel like I’ve accomplished nothing today. I’ve been wracking my brain over what to write. Why do I feel like I need to do this to myself? What do I have to prove? I never said I was a writer, just that I liked to write. So here I am now trying to do it and being driven insane.

You did it to yourself.

For a brief period in the mid 1990’s I lived in Chicago. The winter there is one of the hardest I’ve ever experienced. The winds off Lake Michigan are like icy fingers reaching out to cast a spell over the city and bury the shoreline in a deep freeze. A broad empty glacier dotted by trees bent in misery, the command of a captain that is too harsh on his crew. They are sorrowful in their poses unable to blow, encapsulated in ice, patiently waiting for spring. It is cruel to witness and even crueler to bear. The cold reaches through your clothes to strip away your warmth and leave you exposed. I never had a coat that was warm enough. A wool Navy peacoat that had been my brothers, a stocking cap, a pair of thin socks meant for summer. I was not prepared for these extremes or the way winter was able to hold my soul hostage. I was its captive, too dumb and too young to know how to free myself.

I didn’t realize how much I needed light.

I was out all night and I slept late. I think when I was in Iowa at my parents’ home. I was expected to be up at 6:30 am. Left to my own devices I slept all day, never exposing myself to the sun.

I needed its nourishment.

And then.

I realized you could die. I had never thought of the reality of death. It pinned me to the ground and punched me in the face.

You are going to die. It screamed and I realized that I didn’t’ have time to waste. It could happen at any time.

I was in a battle for my life. I had to create a future. But how. What was I to do?

I looked for comfort but found none. I was alone.

And then my mind broke.

I can remember walking between the tunnels to the trains and seeing a couple of cops coming toward me. I darted my eyes away from them. I was sure they would see I had lost my mind and that they would take me away. Rest easy, they would say as they strapped my body to a bed. I had to get out.

Dear Winter

A beautiful torment

One snowflake and then another

Suddenly I am up to my knees

I fall asleep standing

Lulled by the silence

In the middle of the night, I took a bus home to Iowa. In my seat I rocked back and forth, holding my knees tight against my chest. Through the window barren fields passed. Crumpled cornstalks broken by winter’s blow. There was no color, just grey for as far as the eye could see.

A full moon rises to light my path.

I can’t remember if anyone came to the bus depot to pick me up, but I can remember the light of the parking garage. The eerie glow it cast and how it contrasted against the grey of the dawn. I wonder how I made it to my parents’ house. They often just left us to our own devices.

Once as a child I had swam out too far in a lake. The water was just above my head and I bobbed up and down calling to my mom on the shore. She saw me and waved.

“Christiane Joy,” she shouted, “just hop your way to shore. I can’t come get you. I have to stay up here with the baby and your brother and dad are swimming across the lake.”

So I hopped my way to shore. It’s funny now.

Once home, I either walked the 10 miles or my grandmother came to pick me up, I slept for what seemed like days. Our house was old, built in 1895 and it shook as the frigid winters winds slammed against it frame.

I imagine the snow in the shape of an enormous wave. Hitting our house over and over, an obstacle in its natural path.

I slept in the room that my younger brothers now occupied. I was left alone, which was a surprise. I know the boys and my sister must have been excited to have me home. As I tossed I could hear voices, but they were far away. The walls of home were a comfort. The pile of blankets that lay across my body compressed my soul, forced it to lay inside of me instead of drifting to a place it didn’t need to be.

On I slept. I knew eventually I had to leave. I couldn’t stay here forever. My parents would have been happy to keep me there but I desired more. I had dreams. My fear of death terrified me and guided my path.

The room where I slept had windows covered in thick plastic sheeting held in place by masking tape. The plastic made the view through the window appear distorted, like trying to see through a layer of fog that changes shape in a gale.

In the yard outside our beloved magnolia tree stood majestic against the chill. Stripped of its spring finery it was no less dignified. It would bloom again and we looked forward to the thick pink petals it produced, a symbol of hope in an endless winter.

It was in a dream that I stirred hearing the tap of a branch against the window pane. My heart leapt. The magnolia was in bloom. I felt as though it could hear me calling for it and had produced this flower just for me. Relief flooded my body. Winter is over. It is the time for rebirth in the world.

How cruel it was to open my eyes to reality and see that the tree was not yet in bloom, but that a blizzard had formed in its place. My master, the winter.

Through the storm I stepped back to the bus, back to Chicago, holding my magnolia like a flame close to my heart.