You walk outside and there’s a chill in the air, a pinching of 50 that feels like 30 because you’re used to 80. Like the bottom dropped out, like the sun turned off, but it doesn’t hurt you the same way, feels less like abandonment than it does like memory. It feels like Halloween, like Christmas, like that time you just stood and cried in the cloudy February day because everything seemed to hopeless or perfect or both. They say that smell is the sense linked to memory and you can feel that too, there’s a little woodburny aftertaste in each gust of breath, a little portend of precipitation that has its own olfaction. But mostly, this is just feel. It feels like the past.

You take a step and know that every step herefrom will be difficult, but also hastened, you have that spring of step borne of overchilled air that can sometimes be refreshing. You think of childhood days and piles of leaves, you think of sleds, you think of the sheer exhaustion of the miles your body has somehow traversed, the processing of so much oxygen into dioxide, so much water into urine, so much food into waste, so much love into heartbreak. The passage of time and days can be processed and understood in isolation, but amalgam just breeds overwhelm and a weird interchangeability to the whole project. How could I love this person so deeply, then see them no more? How could I feel such things for more than one person in my existence? How could I be so hungry so often, so tired, so thirsty, so lonely, only to feel overstuffed, overslept, bloated, fulfilled? What manic beasts are we whose mood is only the passing glance at the next diametric change?

You eye the others in your midst, in the mist, the hop-stepping hurriedness of people on the go, people in their own full blare of their own particular sensations, you start to concoct stories of their lives. This one with glasses, that one hairless, a third underdressed, and the little snapshots of their motives and motifs come together like imaginative vines sprouting and clinging to whatever tangible threads they can reach. The sheer possibility of humanity itself another data point in the absurd overwhelm of existence. How would any of these react to a friendly accosting, how would any embrace or reject the entreaty of one human to another. Come, sit, tell me your life, let us invest in each other as passing tourists on this strange plane of tri-dimensional quint-sensational understanding. Do you see what I see? Do you feel the same gusts of the past in the full-bodied intake of air lungward? Do you long for the past, the future, the curve of another’s corporeal form? When, if ever, do you feel solace? How about now?

It matters not how often you try to reach another, for it’s all but inevitable that you will never live your life in that full state. It is the moments of quiet alone with nature that we are most likely to find the inner voice, the razor-slicing clarity to remove all the trappings of form and function and schedule and structure, to cut ourselves down to the very quick of essence and the raw minimalism of our various quests. It is only the lonely who can appreciate connection, just as it is only the thirsty who can appreciate the miracle of mere water. And as you drink, but once, on that sweat-soaked journey’s conclusion, you come to know what a blessing everything is.

You have hope on this day, this whispering sense that not all is lost, that there is fight left in you, that the acts to come may not rival the past but at least somehow justify it. That the cold does not numb you to put you to sleep, but rather to invigorate your sense of resistance, your urge to charge up against that which would thwart your efforts. It is not victory you seek this day, nor even vindication. Merely acknowledgment. Understanding. Awareness of the shared struggle we all undertake for the sake of beings with some worthiness left in them yet. The leaves die to nourish the ground. Our dreams die to nourish our imaginations. There is something to be said for grabbing the fall and embracing it, hugging it like a beloved jacket to our chests, and moving on.

Tears may stain our cheeks, but the skin can renew itself like a tree in winter under the grasping snow. Eventually, everything will melt and be drunk again. Without this water, you know, it would be very hard to live at all.