Civil Acquaintances

The cold settles all around you.

It has fully moved in for this season and it isn't going anywhere. You watch it arrive, as you knew that it would. You couldn't have stopped it from taking up space in your life, in your soul, no matter how hard you would have tried, and so you don't fight it. What's the use? You open the door and you let it in.

You make friends with it, some days. Not friends, even. Civil acquaintances.

You break bread with it. You know it won't stay forever.

Sometimes, you talk behind its back about how much you hate it.

Sometimes, most times, you say that to its face. You say, go to hell, cold! as you pull on your frost bitten mittens that you left in the car the night before, watching your breath turn into tiny droplets of ice, a sluggish white cloud filling the air in front of you each time you shiver, every bone in your body aching in misery while you wait for the cold air blowing from your vents to turn into warmth.

The dark closes in so early now, before the evening has a chance to begin at all.

But, you know this road. You know this cold. And so, you know it will end. You know that each day grows a little longer, each breath pulling in a closer moment until the long awaited arrival of Spring.

You know that you wouldn't love the Spring so feverishly, were it not for this cold.

You use the cold for reflection. For growth. For evolving as a human being. You do this beside a fireplace, holding a steaming cup of matcha, wrapped in blankets and suffocating beneath wool socks,  consuming new books, contending with an inner thirsty urge for sunshine and road trips with a camper and dusty mountain trails and oak trees filled with lush green leaves.

For campfires that don't require digging out chunks of ice inside of the metal ring.

But you are experienced now in life, and with your added years comes the wisdom.

You know that you need the cold. It is a reminder of all the things you love, of how beautiful it is to have those things you love at all. A reminder, even, of how perhaps it makes sense that you can't have those things every minute of every day, because how would you grow at all?

And a reminder even still of how, even though it feels long and hard, it will mold you and change you and you'll soon have those things you love again.