The smell of the cold is disconcerting. Something about the clarity of bareness, the stripping away of hazy thoughts that forces anyone who dares wander outside to pay attention to the wind nipping at their face, the slow seizing of their hands, the dramatic visual assault of dying nature.
I’ve taken to lying outside at the start and end of my days, letting the open system take away my body heat until I’ve reached some kind of equilibrium with the world at large. After staring at the clouds for so long, it feels like my body has been left behind—that all there is that matters is the fisheye meniscus of balding trees curving upwards towards my own personal patch of sky. There’s a stillness, couched with a latent awareness of the world passing by, swirling around the lens. Much is the same when staring into the night for so long that the stars seem to be spiraling out of their allotted space, threatening to animate the entire fabric of sky. The intermittent blindness wrought by passing headlights filtering through the trees perform a kind of temporary effacement—brief glimpses of non-sight, non-sensation, non-existence.
It is this selfsame absorption with the impassivity of the contents of this fisheye horizon that makes returning to a body that’s been lying outside in the cold for an hour so shocking. Once the attention is drawn back to the eye level, it seems like the slightest shift in the air bears a weight of the most unbearable profundity. I am launched into an experience of pastness—not a memory of past events, but of a forgotten feeling, a lost state of mind that I can only scramble to hold onto before the sterile, bland mundanity of the present regains its hold on my brain.
If I stare at just the right spot of dead leaves, with just enough splashes of black asphalt and blue sky, a portal opens—and a wave of old yearning, isolation, desperation, anticipation, dread, sadness, wonder, resignation and emptiness crashes over me. It settles down, throbs in my chest. I am immobilized with a dire need to keep this feeling with me for as long as I can, to explore its confines, find its roots—to see if I have been living numb up until this very moment. In fear of losing this ability to feel, I could only wish to capture this particular coldness, seal it in a column of wax and burn it on nights when the anesthesia has been dialed up too high.
It’s a lovely kind of pain, a kind of nagging, unsettling weight that reminds you that you’re alive. That something can be done before you give in to the cut and dry monotony of the day to day, that there is a continuity between a lost self and the self you are inexorably becoming with each thud of your heart. To have feeling is to join the fight against absurdity that Camus insists we persist, to smile as you roll a boulder up a hill for no other reason than the fact that you are alive. Your entire being cries out, “You must remember this feeling, this moment, this life—stay alive, stay alive, stay alive.”
So will we pick ourselves up, shake out our stiff limbs, give ourselves to the cold one last time before we continue our march in 6/8 time. We will follow our scheduled motions, think iterations of the same thought, and allow our feet to draw us back to the light on the porch, settle into the darkness of yet another End in the string of Ends in our lives. Heading towards somewhere, while staying in place.
It is not in vain that we taste the bittersweet nostalgia of what was, and what could be.
