And so, I pull through another week. Kinda-sorta, only because of that holiday. I saw crocuses yesterday, little purple moments in the dirt, and I thought, If spring is coming, maybe I can make it.
I didn't believe them when they told me about winters here, about the dark and the gloom and the rain. I was here last winter, I told them, and I was fine, and anyway where I'm from in Michigan is another of the cloudiest places in the country. It can't be too much worse than that. But it turns out that it can be, because when I lived in Michigan I was in school, and school, as we notice, gets out much earlier than work. 2:42, or something, or various spaces between university classes. I still had time to be outside. Here, I work all day.
I want the sunshine back. Human beings were not intended to live here.
I tried to drink in the sunlight this weekend, and then I remembered that I did feel this way in college, and I was just as desperate back then to drink the sunlight in January, that year when I went to Kenya and almost cried at the feeling of warm sun on my skin.
Last year, I had a flipflop tan, and I was always cold in the 40 degree weather, as if I'd acclimated to Sudan and my body could not register the change in temperature. Now I have no tan at all, and I'm not cold waiting out there for the bus, but I have no reserve of sunlight to get me through, nor hope of it any time soon.
This is my 15th full winter. I am starting to think that I need to do something to make sure there are not too many more of them. I don't want to move - I hate moving, and I love this city - but I'm not sure this situation is tenable. I can't hibernate for six months every year. It just doesn't work. But I seem to have no choice, in these winters.
On the days (and there are many) when the sight of yet another gray sky makes me want to cry, I remind myself that there are places in this world where the weather is always warm and nearly always sunny. Life is so unfair.
I didn't believe them when they told me about winters here, about the dark and the gloom and the rain. I was here last winter, I told them, and I was fine, and anyway where I'm from in Michigan is another of the cloudiest places in the country. It can't be too much worse than that. But it turns out that it can be, because when I lived in Michigan I was in school, and school, as we notice, gets out much earlier than work. 2:42, or something, or various spaces between university classes. I still had time to be outside. Here, I work all day.
I want the sunshine back. Human beings were not intended to live here.
I tried to drink in the sunlight this weekend, and then I remembered that I did feel this way in college, and I was just as desperate back then to drink the sunlight in January, that year when I went to Kenya and almost cried at the feeling of warm sun on my skin.
Last year, I had a flipflop tan, and I was always cold in the 40 degree weather, as if I'd acclimated to Sudan and my body could not register the change in temperature. Now I have no tan at all, and I'm not cold waiting out there for the bus, but I have no reserve of sunlight to get me through, nor hope of it any time soon.
This is my 15th full winter. I am starting to think that I need to do something to make sure there are not too many more of them. I don't want to move - I hate moving, and I love this city - but I'm not sure this situation is tenable. I can't hibernate for six months every year. It just doesn't work. But I seem to have no choice, in these winters.
On the days (and there are many) when the sight of yet another gray sky makes me want to cry, I remind myself that there are places in this world where the weather is always warm and nearly always sunny. Life is so unfair.
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