Snow.
In October 2010, I had my heart broken. I remember the words, the weather outside, what I was wearing (his t-shirt) and the way it made me feel (empty). I remember that he couldn’t look at me, when his voice cracked in the middle as he said he didn’t love me anymore. I remember our fight the night before, coming home to him passed-out cold, in some weed and booze induced coma. I remember smoking a cigarette in tears ( a terrible idea), blowing smoke in his face to wake him (also not intelligent), the soundtrack of Cat Power (the worst cliche), slipping into bed behind him; smelling his hair, his skin, touching his back, and knowing that this would be the last time I would be doing that. I remember the way he looked at me when he walked me to my car; a mix of sadness and desperation and, it’s done.
I remember walking past a man wearing the same cologne as he had. I remember thinking that it stunk like shit.
In time, these memories will grow murky and recede into the great scheme of things. But that day, and for days after, I endured nothing less, than a little death.
Two months on, I saw snow for the first time in my life. Both experiences left me feeling that I could never be warm again.
In one of the coldest European Winters on record, there I was, relishing in deep, selfish melancholy, looking out onto white endlessness from the window of the Eurostar. Here I discovered the intense silence of snow. Nothing is as lonely, as absolute, I thought. There is rarely any other time, when the entire world would seem to be constituted of one thing, and one thing only.
As a consequence of this harsh Winter, I became more introspective than ever. I dwelled. Everything I looked at took on a greater significance. I cried in front of The Kiss by Klimt. I cried into my fourth mulled wine and decided that from here onwards, I would despise cinnamon. In my head I became a little twisted; vaguely insane. Everywhere I looked, every time I felt like I couldn’t get warm, I thought of him. That cunt who had broken me.
Just as cold creeps into your bones, rattles you, hurts you, and leaves you a little numb to touch; so too, does a broken heart feel unshakable. It colours your world and swallows you. So we run, we seek distraction, another way to feel warm, in any way we can find it. In a book, in a song, in friends, by a fireplace, in heavy drinking. (Spirits work well.)
Eventually, we begin to feel as if we’re growing immune to the cold; it becomes something we can deal with a little better each time we face it.
If only the same could be said of a broken heart.
Just like all the other dreamers and idiots, I realised, soon enough, that there is nothing inherent in traveling that will miraculously heal you or rid you of everything you left behind. Visas expire, but emotional baggage does not. I would, like all the dreamers and idiots before me, return home, fatter and more cynical than how I had left.
Margaret Atwood once wrote that “The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love.” For me, trying to write on love and everything that comes with it, is to be confronted with the immense failure of language. It’s always too much, or too little. Excessive and impoverished, all at once. It’s never enough.
For fear of the story of my broken heart being too full, too empty, too dramatic or too pale, in that Winter, I found a new way to describe it. I could assign it to a Season; something a little more permanent, a little more unchangeable than language. I could defy Shakespeare and all the other great romantic storytellers, and instead, compare thee to a Winter’s day. Afterall, in the end, everyone stops feeling like Summer.
Just as our tolerance of the elements grows; as we lug the immeasurable weight of a broken heart around, it begins to feel a little lighter. We go on living because it’s what we humans do best. And it’s all that we know.
We need the cold. Without it we would never realise the beauty in heat. Without heartbreak we would never see love in colour. Broken and stitched up, what we’re left with, is the gift of truly knowing love when we see it; warmth when we feel it, all because we’ve lived through the darkness of Winter.
Dedicated to my Grandma, my hero, whose seen 82 Winters and still complains about them every single time.
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