I feel the sun growing further from the earth, as though the sun knows how small we feel and wants to exacerbate the loneliness of our size and distance from everything that matters in the universe. Winter is coming, and it's lonely. Not because the birds have flown and all of the naked trees, but also because all of our celestial bodies leave us to fend for ourselves. Our breaths on the air comfort our bodies, most of what is left to us. Breathing the language of clouds, we crunch beneath our boots everything that's fallen from the sky.

The thaw. Feeling this cold so thoroughly finally is like a thaw to me. Every winter, I always forget what it feels like to be invaded completely by an intangible element like the wind. Winter is an invitation to be invaded. By staying here, refusing to migrate, we're raising our voices to praise the forces that want to break us. Winter hotboxes us into our homes until they no longer feel like homes.

Only in winter can we move away from the sun so fast, confusing it for languor or laziness.

Hide and seek is strangely intimate. I remembered this after forgetting it somewhere along the course of my childhood. Last night I was hiding from him in the hallway, crouched on the stairs, gripping the railing and listening to my own heart and breath, waiting for his head to appear over the railing above me, to smile down upon me in victory and mischief.

The intimacy grows the smaller and darker the space. Underneath a bed. In a closet. Under a blanket. Inside a cabinet. Has everyone forgotten the intimacy of hide n seek? When people want throwbacks to their youth, they play tag, they play capture the flag, they play basketball, they play truth or dare, they play spin the bottle. They don't play hide n seek. Why.

It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in something, someone wrote on BIW. This is one of those facts that stick in my brain so thoroughly, inexplicably. I think of it every time I sit down to write now. I've spent 10,000 hours sleeping. I've spent 10,000 hours eating, but sometimes I still miss my mouth. I don't know if this assertion has any validity after all. I've spent 10,000 hours reading, and I still miss things. Sure, I can do it fast, but it's about quality of processing, not the quantity of words read.

A girl I once dated looked at crescent moons and exclaimed, "Oh! God's fingernail clipping!" Like the wasted products of our gods are things of immense beauty to us, and to see anything more than waste would kill us with beauty.

There's a galaxy of condensation on my window, glowing with the light sucked up and magnified from the streets outside. I'm waiting for something that may not be coming. I'm waiting for another thing that I know I have to birth into existence by a certain time. I'm tired. When you try to text the word 'tired', the word that comes up first is 'three.' I'm three.

I might buy a bottle of Goldschlager and swing by a stranger's place to drink. It would be better than waiting for the thing I'm waiting for and watching people drag their shadows behind them across the parking lot, in transit to warm places with good company to lose themselves in.

A patient in my therapist's office once said (and I heard through the door), "There were so many terrible miles." She might have said something else that was distorted through the wood paneling of the door. But that's what it sounded like. "There were so many terrible miles." Of what? Where? Why? I like to think we're all self-possessed and the things that make the miles terrible aren't out of our own control. What if they are?

The skyscrapers! Cold reminds me of skyscrapers. Why? Because cold goes on forever, it's endless. Cold is like a bad dream. And what else can you do in a bad dream except go on forever into the sky and wait for it to end? I find myself doing that more and more, looking up and waiting for the end. What would happen if I lived around more skyscrapers? What if I built a skyscraper of my own doing? Out of wood and Christmas lights and people's old couches? How fast would it be destroyed? How slow? Who would do it? People would gather and look up at nothing, just a small structure disappearing into the clouds. No end. They would see no end and wonder. How many miles up before I need a fishbowl of air around my head? How many miles up before my building is interrupted by the swerving of planes? And if I fell, how many seconds would I fall for before I hit the ground and my life went out like a door being slammed in the middle of nowhere?
-- free-write, October 10, 2009