I am the madness, the loss, the dark, the hunt, the cage, the race

It is so appropriate that dementors are cold. Hell cannot have fire.  I am so miserable here.

I’d forgotten. In Alabama, I’d gotten used to walking outside without cringing, stepping outdoors without feeling like I’d jumped into a melting glacier. It was in the 60s and 70s for much of my break; colder sometimes, but then I just wouldn’t leave the house. And Alabama-cold is like, 30s or 40s. If it was in the 40s here, girls would probably start sunbathing.

The cold is like an attack, a vicious animal that leaps on you the instant you step outside, like acid eating at your face or a thousand tiny needles sticking in your skin. It’s abrasive, like sand, and wind feels like rocks are scraping at your skin.  And it shrinks every part of you until you want to curl up inside yourself and die.

I’m sore at night from being tense all day. And I miss the freedom of heat, the spontaneity. Now when I go outside I am so bundled up that I feel like I am waddling. If I fall down the stairs, I suspect I would bounce.

I miss feeling lithe and free, every step only an instant away from sprinting through streets, flying through grassy fields.  I miss the sound of birds chirping, and crickets at night. Instead everything is frozen, dead, shades of white and gray, like dead flesh. 

I miss summer, when sunshine pours on you like a liquid blanket, a golden scarf. Winter pulled that away and the bitterness of the sky descended upon us, and I walk huddled down and shiver and wonder, how could anyone have thought heaven was in the sky? 

Maybe if I was to confront the cold, to challenge it, instead of hiding, then I could walk with confidence.  If I were to strip off my layers and run outside and let the icy air whip at my body, feel the cold seep into my skin, and raise my arms and embrace it, even, and scream this doesn’t hurt, you’re not hurting me, I’m okay, -- then maybe I would smile at the weather report, spend the winter shrugging instead of cringing.  Maybe.

But I can’t, so I look for small things to love. The shadows of trees on the snow. The bright early morning sunlight. The freshness of the air. But it’s all so bleak and barren, piles of dirty snow lining the paths and streets, gritty salt tracked in on the carpet, salt lines on the legs of my jeans. Maybe spring will be extra-beautiful after this. I hope so.

Thankfully, Audrey is just as unhappy with the weather as I am. Our thermostat is up as hot as it goes, and we’ve bonded a little over our complaining. Of course, she’s also been, um, “reuniting” with Will at every chance she gets, so I’m spending a lot of time in Alice’s room, which is significantly colder, but Alice and I have a lot to catch up on too. 

So this is my first weekend back.  My classes have been mostly good so far, but not too much of substance yet.  I really wanted to sleep in today – I was hanging out with Riley and some other friends until about three last night – but they’re doing construction on a building near my dorm and it’s excruciatingly loud. But we have tomorrow off, at least.

Last night Riley kept putting his arm around this girl Jana. I don’t know whether he was trying to make me jealous or trying to get over me. Or maybe he actually likes her, and I was just a fleeting thought, a magic spell of snow and moonlight. I didn’t really like her, and she seemed to hate me, but in theory, it would be good if he liked someone else.

I saw Jason on Thursday, right before my writing workshop. He was coming out of the classroom that I was going in; he said hey and briefly hugged me, but he seemed in a hurry. Still, it was nice, and something to hold on to throughout the agonizing three hour class.

What was I thinking? I already don’t fit in my English classes, and this is like that, times a thousand.  We started by going around and introducing ourselves and talking about our writing.  Everyone was talking about how they’ve always known they were going to be an author and words were their salvation and they just feel compelled to write, and they wrote their first novel when they were fifteen but since then have been converted to poetry and of course, writing is THE most important thing in their lives.

I was thinking: if you are so damn good, why are you in an intro class? But instead I mumbled something about wanting to try writing fiction, because I like to daydream about things, and I might as well put them into words.

As soon as I finished, this pale, ultrathin girl raised her hand. “I thought this was a class for serious writers?” she asked. “Because I’ll move to the other class, if it would be more suited, you know, to be at a more serious level—”

I stared at her, mouth gaping, but my professor cut in. “I’ve read everyone’s writing samples, and we can all learn a great deal from this class,” she said cheerily. So we did a short exercise, and then she asked if anyone wanted to read theirs for the class. The vampire girl (by vampire, I mean ugly and creepy, not Bella Swan), volunteered, and it was all about wounds and death and icicles and teardrops glinting on the blade like starlight, etc, and then something about the injustice of being a woman and “blood dripping through the centuries”.

It was awful, but hilarious, because there was a stage at the beginning of high school when I did write, which I neglected to confess in our introductions since I didn’t think that kind of shit counted as writing. Allie and I both “wrote”, before she sensibly gave it up for Photoshop, and I sensibly gave it up for, you know, actual real life.  We both wrote these horrible emo poems, which I think is a pretty common teenage girl stage. We gave up quickly. But months afterwards, one day sophomore year when we were bored in world history, we wrote a bunch of random phrases on flashcards, and shuffled them to create different poems. It was so easy. Here are the approximate ingredients, or at least what I remember offhand (feel free to suggest more!):

Night / inky darkness / abyss
Starlight / moonlight
Death / hell / eternity
Rain / tears
Blood / wine
Icicles / crystal / diamonds / shattered glass
Knife / blade / razor
Heartbreak / betrayal
Eyes / mask
Angels
Shadows / echoes / whispers

We’d started turning it into a madlibs type thing – Tonight the (noun) is (dramatic adjective), like (noun)/ I (verb) but (dramatic noun), etc. (“Tonight the moon is razor-sharp, like shattered glass/ I stared into the abyss but saw an angel’s mask”.) But then we were laughing so hard that our teacher figured out we weren’t actually making World War II study cards, and she made us stop.

So I have to write something for next week, but I figure if I can’t come up with anything, I can always resurrect our game.  I don’t remember permutations very well, but I bet twenty words would last me all semester. Bonus: vampire-girl might respect me.

Anyway, I should start my Spanish homework, but it’s so tedious. I can’t concentrate on conjugations; instead I start daydreaming about “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and the effect that grammar has on every aspect of our lives. My medical anthropology books haven’t come in yet, or I would read them. But instead I’m sitting here by the heater, pretending its hot dry exhalation is the summer sun beating on my skin.

It’s not even close. So I’ll stare out of the window, watching snow flurries float down against the orange streetlight. They’re in big flakes, like dust drifting down from destruction from above, or confetti from some raucous party in the clouds.

I know that a new layer of snow will make everything look fresher, prettier. But sometimes I’m worried I’ll forget the original form of all those faintly menacing white lumps.  I should do homework, but it’s more fun to think about what these abstract shapes could be. That bench =  a treasure chest in disguise? The grass = a giant Twister mat? I know this doesn’t count as being more engaged, but I wish there was more to things.