Bluer skies on winter nights
You know all that curiosity baggage that comes with the questions people make about why you don’t like something? And sometimes you don’t even quite remember how it all came to be, but their questioning brings the whole history to consciousness and, ahh, you remember.
I say I’ve never liked the cold. They look at me as if I am out of my mind. Why wouldn’t anyone? Why wouldn’t I? I say I’ve never liked the cold as if it were the whole truth, when thinking back, I didn’t mind it as much for about fifteen years.
Miniskirts in November. Lace tops under a trench coat in December. Gloveless hands in the snow in January, all because I hated layers. But, “I’m cold,” I’d complain in February just as in July, wearing a cashmere hoodie under a hot sunny sky. So maybe I was right when I said I’ve never liked the cold.
No. It’s not that I liked it; I just didn’t mind the chilly winds that much for about fifteen years, but I still preferred summers. I hated the gray sky after four o’clock, when the day quickly turned into night; I hated how my mood shifted, how my untroubled mind turned dark on winter nights. And that was just the start.
One cold December evening, as I struggled my way out of a packed parking lot, trying to keep a tight grip on the stiff steering wheel, my gloved hands felt like I had just put my fingers in ice and they immediately froze on contact. Maybe it’s this freezing car, I thought, blasting the heat to warm it up.
But it was still as cold as it was outside.
My fingers got worse. So I removed my gloves to rub my hands together right where the hot air was blowing from. And that’s when I saw the colors — white, blue, purple, pink… what on earth was this? An attack of Raynaud’s, I found out months later.
Is your hate for something justified when it turns medical? I said I’ve never liked the cold and people think I’m being silly, but I had just learned that I had new, literal underlying reasons to hate the cold weather.
So what worse reasons did I need?
I may not always think of why or remember the right order of events, but this essentially sums up my transition of how I moved south in search of warm bluer skies on winter nights.
