 I remember winter.
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Nov. 21st, 2008 @ 03:46 am 
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It's snowing. There are great, wet flakes of it drifting down out of an endless, lightless sky, and every one that touches me is like a sweet, soggy kiss from home, from the winters of my memory. I don't remember clearly, of course. What I remember is filtered, distilled, flashes like photographs, moving like something more. Softer, but with edges still sharp here and there, sharp enough to catch myself on and see it over again, once in a while.
Winter nights are especially so. Maybe it's the clarity of the air. In winter, outside of the range of city-lights and vagueness, the air is so clear it hurts my head. I can see stars that perhaps I shouldn't be able to, stars that should be too far away, in unfamiliar patterns. Winter nights always feel like they are set aside out of time. Separate. Sacred. Not holy- that's too much to do with gods and religions, and I don't have much to do with that sort of thing (possibly in the hope that they'll have just as little to do with me)- but sacred, something special in and of itself, beyond the purview of any deity and its laws and dictums.
There was a night when I was maybe fourteen, and it had snowed. It was thick on the ground and unsullied yet, except for here and there the faint marks of birds' feet, or the lopsided four-point mark of a running rabbit. It had snowed and the air had cleared absolutely, and above me were the stars and the piercing moon. It wasn't full- it might have been just a bit past half full, but not by much- but it was gaspingly bright, bright as a knife edge, and it shone on the clean snow and lit the world as brilliantly as any sun. The shadows are different by moonlight of course, and the quality of light is, too. There's something in the cold blue-white of moonlight that can make anyone believe in magic.
I certainly did.
I couldn't sleep. I got up and, being fourteen and stupid, I didn't bother to properly dress, but I went outside in a long skirt and a loose sweater and no shoes and I stared up at the sky and a smooth-edged landscape unpoisoned by city lights, lit only by the moon, the stars, and the mirror that was the snow.
And I ran. I still don't know why. I had to; it was the only thing that made sense. I ran as fast as I could, leaned down like an ice skater over the whiteness beneath me, and everywhere in front of me the snow stretched, unbroken and clean, and behind me only my footprints, wider apart when I looked at them later than I think they could possibly have been. I must have been taking huge strides, but it felt good. I felt wild. I felt, for a few minutes, like I belonged to that night, that moon, those stars, that sheet of white. There was no other night like it. The moon would never be that moon, and those stars would never be those stars, and I would never be that much myself, never again, and that sense of belonging to it was a gift.
Winter memories are clear ones. They're memories of solitude and half-sleeping, and in that sleeping, finding something that I can't really touch the rest of the year, when it's sunnier and noisier and busier. The world settles in the winter, and I settle with it, and that's good for me.
And right now, it's snowing outside, under a sky that goes on forever without lights in it, without any interruption but the slowly falling, wet flakes, and it's good to remember.
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