[Story Index] [Discussion Thread] [The Asylum]
Another Winter
By Shadow23
2000-11-24
Staring down the barrel of a bleak season...
There is snow on the ground, has been for two weeks now, and sporadically for a month before that. The wind is biting harder by the day. The car takes longer to start, and is losing its sure-footedness to ever-expanding patches of permafrost. I sympathise with it. The trees are bare, they cannot stand the icy breeze. Again, I feel for them. I am alone, bracing myself against the same chill.
I wish I could be like so many creatures, go into hibernation, and crawl out bleary-eyed when the planet is once again fresh and green and warm, ready to start clean, but I cannot. I must brave the world, force myself out into the cutting elements daily, in order to retain my nest, to which I return alone in the bitter evening.
Once there, I warm myself not with fires and the comfort of others, but the twin blue glows of the TV and the monitor. There is a fireplace, a remnant of a more organic time, but it burns wood, and the protectors of this city tell us wood-burning is a crime, more often than not. I am told what nights I can light a pyre and what nights I cannot, in the name of public health and clean, if chill, air. So I reach into the flickering sparks of dual CRTs, reach a tendril out toward the great backbone, and seek the warmth and company of an endless flow of binary digits.
What is gained, what is lost by this mutation of age-old traditions? Exchanging the warm, smoky flicker of burning logs for that of raw data, trading a journey to the local pub for the company of those I only know thru glowing pixels. I encounter minds from an ever broader spectrum of time and place, but raw contact and perhaps true intimacy is reduced to a plane of cold glass. It seems sometimes only those more well off than myself can afford to be physically amongst people. Maybe the world is simply telling me I must get my shit together before I can rejoin its society.
Will I become my own Donner Party? A cannibalized soul whose only goal is raw survival? Is it possible I might not desire the physical comfort of others after all? What must I give to be satisfied? Entire portions of a once legendary collection of music have been sacrificed to bill collectors, but what is that, really, save more stored data? Easily replaced, in one form or another. The sections of my soul which have been placed on the altar of commerce are quite another. Sanity, perhaps, basic face to face interaction, the physical comfort of human contact are gaps not so easily filled. The warm company of a chosen few, and most often one only, have been lost to me. The few true friends I've known say they are available anytime, I simply need call, but they have more immediate concerns, warm bodies to attend to, the company of significant others. Am I now insignificant? Close bonds seem beyond my grasp. Are they there for the taking, am I imagining so much isolation? Where do I go from here?
Maybe it's just the weather.