cold cream

black cake, lace hems, and where the snow isn't.

It was wet & white & swift and where I am
I don't know. It was dark and then
it isn't.
I wish the barker would come. There seems to be to eat
nothing. I am unusually tired.
I'm alone too. 

If only the strange one with so few legs would come,
I'd say my prayers out of my mouth, as usual. 
Where are his notes I loved?
There may be horribles; it's hard to tell.
The barker nips me but somehow I feel
he too is on my side.

I'm too alone. I see no end. If we could all
run, even that would be better. I am hungry.
The sun is not hot.
It's not a good position I am in. 
If I had to do the whole thing over again
I wouldn't.

— Snow Line, John Berryman

---

Time moves in spirals— when I look up from my feet, I find myself running parallel to being eleven years old. I keep my head down. I do the work to keep the days running neatly; tidy this, fix that, make this, write that down. I don’t plan for the future. I don’t tell people no when they reach out to touch me, even if I want to. I catch the flu and hardly even notice because I’m used to feeling bad. I struggle to fall asleep. I dream of the kitchen knives, turning the blades around in my head and thinking about what I’d do with them if I knew it would all turn out okay. All my dreams are strange. My black cake came out strange. My days are spent playing housewife to my mother, cleaning up the messes she makes out of rooms and people. She says I run a tight ship and I tell her that I know. I don’t argue or fight back, and I don’t need to, because no one picks a fight with me. I am too perfect to fight. Too dutiful, too loving, too obedient. They get embarrassed to hurt me when I’m such a sweet girl.

It’s a bit funny because, even with all that I’ve done, I still remember eleven years old as one of the worst years of my life. I spent a lot of time looking at my feet then, too. All my edges were sanded off so my suffering could be more gentle, easier for others to deal with.

Imagine white milk shot through with dark blood. Pour yourself a glass and watch the red fade. Almost a decade later, I don’t know how to drink it down any more than I did then. It never leaves. The meds work for everything except the anhedonia so I just sit quietly inside of it and keep my head down and do whatever is next. I wash the dishes. I buy presents for the holidays. I remind my mother about the appointments she has to keep. Life, if this is what it is, has always been a series of “next” for me— the fires that need to be put out, the deadlines that are approaching, the food that’s going bad. The future only exists as long as the “next” does. And there’s an honor in that, the mundanity of persistence, but it’s not going to get me very far. I don’t know if I want to go far. I don’t know what I want for myself. All I know is that I don’t want this— the slow, Sisyphean drag of duty, the two-way leash attaching me to my parents, the lack of sensation. I just don’t.

Dear God. It barely snowed at all last year. We got a few flurries, but they didn’t bother sticking, vanishing the moment they hit the ground. There was slightly more the year before that, but still not enough to cover the grass. Now it’s the middle of December and I haven’t even seen any frost yet. I can leave the house in a hoodie without getting cold. Still no snow. No snow and I don’t know what to do.

There are photos from decades and decades ago of snowdrifts downtown, big enough to hide a car in. There are shaky videos from my childhood of my sibling and I stumbling through thigh-high snow, hitting each other with globs of slush. There’s a child I babysat a few months ago who didn’t believe me when I said there used to be enough snow to sled on; she was born too late to see it for herself. I’ve got things to cry about, should I become the type of person who cries, but when I’m walking around the neighborhood at night, the snowless city is what gets me. There’s a high chance that I’m never going to see it truly snow here again. It’s just gone, and there’s nothing I can do about it. So many things are vanishing. I know that I’m getting older, that time is passing, because everything seems unrecognizable to me.

And what else is left? There’s a folder of old pictures of me on my laptop that I can’t open without feeling sick. There’s an empty carton of Parliaments sitting in the gutter. There’s a dozen landmarks of my childhood that have become overpriced grocery stores or parking lots or ugly modern houses, retained only by my memory. There’s a playlist I put together of songs that feel cozy, as if I can conjure real winter through sheer idealism, and there’s less blankets on my bed than there should be, and I think there’s a hole in my chest that’s just waiting for someone to put it there.

In less than a month, I’ll turn 21, just in time to legally do everything that I’m already sick of. Happy fucking birthday. I blow out the candles on my black cake and make a wish for snow.

---

I guess I’m being overly dramatic. Round one of the holidays was fine. I spray-painted a pair of heels black because I had nothing to wear to something I didn’t want to do, and I ended up shellacking myself into an empty migraine. I got locked into a hunch that I’m still in and now there’s tension in my neck that won’t leave me alone. That being said, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be— no one took pictures of me while I was asleep or told me to take off my clothes, which is a dismally low standard that still automatically makes it better than past holidays.

The world around me is settling into December. When the sky is clear, it cracks like a robin’s egg. Strings of lights are finding their ways onto porches and roofs. People are shifting into the things they need to be, going to the places they need to go. Some people are burning in their own heat. Some people are liquefying just to turn solid in the night, frosting over the hoods of cars. Some people are ambient and dismembered and loved. Some people get the honor of being harpists, because it is an honor, and I’m only a little bit jealous. I think a lot about strings these days, fabric-adjacent and instrument alike. I think about being tied to things because I think I might be tied to something that I can’t see. There’s a chance that I’m just walking my black dogs around on a leash that I refuse to let go of. I should drop it but I don’t. Call me Bad Dog.

There’s nothing better for me to do so I spend an entire night, from 10 p.m. to sunrise, picking lint off my nightgown and picking lint off my nightgown and picking lint off my nightgown and picking lint off my nightgown and picking lint off my nightgown. Then I’m picking the stub of a candle out of a brass candle holder, picking my battles, and picking tarot cards to decide my future. Then I’m picking myself up off the ground, over and over, and walking into the kitchen and eating food I don’t care about and going back to bed because there’s nothing better for me to do. Then I’m picking people to pretend I’m in love with and I’m pimping myself out to them in my head. Then I’m pissing off the people who I depend on for survival, but they’re not that mad and they calm down real quick because I’m too nice to stay angry at. Then I’m piloting a grounded bird into the fog. Then I’m pinching pennies for future corner store sodas. Now I’m piping down again, because I have nothing to say and don’t want to talk, and then I’ll go back to picking the lint off my nightgown. Because there’s still nothing better for me to do.

I don’t know why there’s so much lint on this dress. It’s driving me mad, but I suppose that’s just what I get for liking lace hems. The lint will never end. It grows like mold. It’s not even a big deal, but they’re still going to shoot me dead. Pistol— how’s that for a pi- word?

---

My dream, on the nights where hope is bearable (because it’s often very painful to be hopeful): a little house, all my own. Maybe a trailer home in the woods, because I’ve seen some real estate listings and I know that it’s cheaper to buy a small house out there than it is to rent a shared apartment in the city.

(I don’t even like this city that much, even though it isn’t all bad. I hope you understand me when I say that I just can’t really be here anymore. I just can’t do it.)

My shoes by the door. My coats in the closet. My books on the shelves. Lace curtains, secondhand dishes, a warm quilt on an overstuffed couch, an old car parked in the clearing out front. Wildflowers in the kitchen, because I think weeds are beautiful and there would be no one around to disagree with me or be allergic to them. No one to call me childish for having my old stuffed animals on the bed, or to prevent me from wearing just my underwear in the summer, or to invite people over without letting me know. No smell of stale coffee or junk mail scattered across the counter. Maybe I’d have a pet— a cat, a dog, a rat— to keep me company. I can’t imagine there’s much space in the house, but I don’t need that much. I’m easily satisfied.

Tea in the morning, then work— a job I can do mostly from home, something that pays enough to cover the cost of living— and movies in the evening. Maybe I’d finally take up weaving. Maybe someone loves me. Maybe I love them back. Maybe they come over for dinner because I invited them and I want them next to me. Studies show that people with touch deprivation are much more likely to spend a long time in the bath or shower; I like to think that someday, there’s going to be a time where bathing only takes me ten minutes. And what more is there to say? I want quick showers and space and I want something of my own, something that belongs just to me. I want it to snow for the sake of narrative symmetry, if not the assurance that everything dead and dying will come back and my life isn’t lost forever. I want it to be cold again.

When I look out the window, the sky is cloudy and the air is still relatively warm. I know it’s not going to happen. You don’t have to lie to me. But in my little house, in my winter dream, it gets properly cold when the seasons change. Snow is going to fall over that house. And things aren’t easy and the world hides and disappears from me, and I’m bad at doing things I don’t want to do, but when I can, I think of that house. All I can do is reach for it while I’m stumbling my way through the dark. One day it’ll be mine. Then there’s going to be snow again.