Ella Peirce

A collage of some recent pictures I have taken this winter.

Each year, I walk between rows upon rows of pine trees, toeing the line between nostalgia and living in the shell of my former self.

It’s a tradition, driving myself to the brink of insanity.

This year, in an unwelcoming December with a nip of self-hatred and an addicting spiral of flippant agony, the weight of my age has found its way onto the pile. 

16 years filled to the brim with pink-cheeked, bruise-laden winters. My lifelong escape from the cold—the literal, the metaphorical, the biting—has been a world of more cold.

It’s almost impossible to write about such a thing. It’s why I haven’t and why I still barely am. I’m combining it into a winter column, as describing the seasons comes more naturally to me than unadulterated love.

My earliest memories are frozen. Not in time, but in unforgiving, unforgettable sheets of ice. I could try to be poetic about the way my silver blades carve miniature love letters into the ice, leaving pieces of me in the ground, set to be erased within the hour. But figure skating has never been poetic for me.

It has been all-encompassing and all-consuming, covering my brain in a sheet of snow, icing out my problems, and forcing a cool wave of calm to reside over me. It’s everything, everywhere, every time I breathe, but it’s not something I have to think about. 

My newest memories are just as frozen. 

My newest memories—tired limbs, laughing too loud, blanketed drives, smiling truthfully—are beautiful in their capsules, surrounded by ice.

Even in the sweetness of the summer, a piece of me remains buried in the snow. Even in the captivating spiral of the fall, even in the blooming warm breath of the spring, I am immortalized in the barren landscape of the Decembers I have lived. In late Novembers, in the gray of January. I do not identify with the February slush, but I am indebted nonetheless.

By March, I will be oh so sick of the winter, and I will be sick of myself in return.

I will yearn to return to November mornings when the absence of sun felt like the warmest of homecomings. I am going to beg for late December nights when I, at last, experience peace among the single strand of lights on my windowsill.

I spend the first half of each year trying to understand why I’m wasting away, and then I spend the rest remembering that life is not an eternal spring.

Each year, my tears fall with the first snow as I come back to what I know: home is not the warm, orange glow that sits in addresses and buildings; my home is the winter and the evergreen trees and memories frozen, perfectly frozen, in ice.