You need warm contexts, you need all the warmth of the world.

You catch up with me in all of my attempts at running away. This is as good as his city now, and I feel him in every streetlight and cafe and thin breath of cold air. As though cigarettes and Cake and Cadillacs and Albuquerque had never existed before you.

It's fucking cold here.

I stood outside in the cold for a very long time tonight, watching the warm orange glow of a firelit living room full of family and posole and middle-aged men who play with guitars as though they were still seventeen. When you are warm you forget about how the cold hurts, how it shocks you with it's bluntness from the outset, and then slowly crawls under layers of clothing to methodically numb each successive toe, wrist, nose; any susceptible skin that is naive of covering. Listing in her mind like a crazy person all possible types of coats, in alphabetical order: "Anorak, Blazer, Bolero, Bomber Jacket, Capote, Cardigan... all the way through Tailcoat, Trench coat, Ulster, Windbreaker..."

I despise the snow, and the wind; I hate the bluntness of an icy chill or a frigid, soggy stocking full of numb toes and ankles. Extreme heat, though harsh and consuming, doesn't bite like the cold of a thousand simultaneous needles, but rather like a slow suffocation of the body and mind; a methodical and obtuse insanity. Cold, on the other hand, is an acute pain.

But the past few weeks the cold has been a pleasure. Some days the bare branches and redyellow leaves accumulating in my back yard serve as a reminder of the natural and necessary course of change, the seasonal nature of life that allows everything to grow through the intoxicating heat of the summer and the bare and helpless depression of the winter.

Other nights the cold is protective and distracting from the greater pain to be felt underneath the skin. Grateful for the gray afternoons, and sweaters that hug close to protect bare shoulders from a sun too lighthearted for the wintered weight I carry, it is easier to stand still while the cold infiltrates and anesthetizes placid limbs than to make your feet move toward firelit windows, where inside you will only find a different kind of cold.

Top 5 All Time Ultimate Defense Mechanisms
#1. Pretend like everything is okay when it's clearly not.
#2. Run away to a new city where I can pretend to be anyone else but the girl who adored you.
#3. Vacillate between hating you, loving you, and hating myself.
#4. Try to hide in the arms and mouths and thoughts of strangers.
#5. Forget what there ever was to like about myself in the first place.

I stared at that photo of those two attractive and smiling-faced lovers who may or may not have been as happy at the time that the moment was digitally imprinted in black-and-white as their photographic physiognomies may have suggested. I stared at it and could not look away, just as I could not convince my feet that the proper plan of cold-evading action would be to move toward the direction of the orange glow of the door. I continued staring long past the time when the faces warped in that way that happens when you stare at something familiar for so long that it becomes alien, eyes bulging and morphing into those of a disfigured stranger. Suddenly noses seem like such an unnatural idea, and you think, "who thought that up?"

I stared our happy-memory photo into neutrality, a numbing compilation of chemicals and pixelated dots, knowing all too well that if you zoom far enough in to the black-and-white features that they will eventually blur over and the meaning will dissipate in the same way as if you had stared it into obscurity and oblivion.