Before there is snow, there is the rest of it. It starts with mornings spent lingering a little longer in bed, linens folded and stowed away, and breath curling over rapidly cooling coffee. The first assault, then: hail and freezing rain. Fallen leaves turning into mulch and restaurant menus screaming their new butternut squash special. But before I have a chance to gather myself, nature presses on. Sidewalks harden and turn black with ice, and a permanent chill invades the city buses and settles into my bones, and I know then, that I will never stop feeling cold. I greet it with open hostility. When the snow finally falls, it is almost a temporary relief.
There is nothing remarkable about this week or even this year so far, except that I have been staunchly refusing to exist in any moment but the present. I push away memories of falling sleep under the sun with a half read book in my lap and the lake in my ears. I have no thought of the future that awaits me, replete with children and weddings, or perhaps graduate school escapades and regretted piercings. I am choosing instead to fully inhabit the present. Right now, I am bent over the kitchen counter, scribbling this down with a blunt pencil. Outside, large snowflakes gently float down to the branches and sidewalks, promising romance, belying the gloom that has settled over the city. The sun has not been seen in twenty days. The barista tells me she's sad, and my friend tells my other friend he's sad, and I tell my father that I'm sad, and so life goes on. The present is now, walking home with my groceries in hand, snow in my nostrils. It's my upstairs neighbour cranking up the heat and my downstairs neighbour promptly turning it down, and waking up each morning wondering who won last night. I remember that Ellen Bass told me to love life, love it even when I have no stomach for it, and so I try. The present is now, monitoring a simmering rice pudding while qawwalis play in the background, and now, contemplating my worth as a daughter, and now, on my knees scrubbing salt stains out of my floors. And this present begs a question of me, of if life could possibly be worth living because it is inherently cyclical. Tomorrow, there will be fresh snow, and my sister will tell me that she's sad. One more winter night will lay siege to this city, and I will soldier through it. I'm beginning to think that the salt stains on my floors will never fade.
It started out as an experiment in masochism, like penance for the hedonism of summer, a resignation to the mundanity of life until I realized, just yesterday actually, that I don't feel cold anymore because an inextinguishable, mad idea has seized me—that this moment, laden with fog, salt and warts and all—is simply enough.