A palette in summer consists of a splattering of ginger, tinged lavender, glassy blues, and bosky banks of verdurous greens.
A palette in winter is an excess of subdued gray—maybe brown on a good day—dribbled with blacks and blues and a million other hues of pain that cause nagging aches, both internal and external in the form of scaly skin and dwelling burnout.
I’m not an artist, but I know my treacherous attempts at painting a barren scene in the height of winter would be quite accurate: lifeless, tiresome, and utterly alarming if the sun pokes out from a canopy of wan clouds.
A few days ago, I saw the sunrise in the morning for the first time since fall. It wasn’t as magnificent as the light shows that I chase in the summers with my friends, but the sky was riddled with streaks of pink and plum, something so delicate that I feared a gust would cover it with meddlesome clouds.
One glimpse of a fragile sunrise, and I was transported back to the early mornings and late nights of summer, the moments when the air smelled like campfire smoke instead of rotting snow and the sky melted into gold after a long day of incessant sunlight. It stuck out hideously against the decaying trees and frail vigor of life and soon evaporated into another day of spiritless torpor.
It’s been six months and a thousand years without sunrises and sunsets, and I am starting to forget what it feels like to walk outside without tensing against the bitter strike of cold.
I can handle a few months of winter drudgery, but when I think about where one-month starts and the next ends, I get scared: January is the same as November, and I am pretty sure I am right where I was back in December even though it is two months later.
No jolting memories come to mind when I think about the gray space in these months, just a haze of sameness. It’s hard to make the most of 365 days when a quarter of them are spent laboring through life with no recollection of changing seasons or months.
This past summer was marked by smiles and concerts and day trips to the beach to roll around in hot sand, and now I mark my days by the months it takes until I can do that all over again. My life feels wasted in these four months of live hibernation, constantly wishing I was doing anything other than recoiling against the cold and faking a smile when it’s overcast for the umpteenth time; the calendar passes without so much as a backward glance—if that, if I’m being honest.
I’m patiently waiting for the brighter days and even brighter nights where the memories are memorable, and nothing tries to hide the summer sunsets.
