Oh Heavenly Day in anticlimatic

It was bitterly bright and gloriously cold today.

My fingers stiffened into brittle twigs in the dawn’s light on my front porch and not even the hot coffee between them could avail. I marked the view as usual, the roof lines of my neighbors, the white smoke chimneys, the bent brown fingers of the leafless trees. I remember doing this at my first apartment when I was 18, taking inventory of each still winter’s morning.

I feel like less of a person than then. Not in matters of value, but in the spirit of what I once thought a person to be. The shapes and codes and rituals and impulsive pathologies that once served as an outline to the person I was have altered. I’ve not yet noticed what to, if anything. I do not think it something worse, objectively speaking.

I feel like my oldest and most cherished memories, that I worried so much about losing, are now near lost. I can still see part of the outline of what was once there, but the content is all washed out now- like a carbon receipt faded nearly all to white. When there’s nothing there, there’s nothing really to miss, but I have the sense that I had something special there for a while.

Special things are underground for now. The languor of this covid winter is all we have to experience. Beautiful day, though. That distant scent of wood smoke through the crystals is keeping me upright, I believe.