face into a winter wind, so cold it brought tears to my eyes. All around me was the sound of water, and frozen sand moving over itself. The lake was active, the colour of steel, beautiful and cold. It seemed the perfect place and I lingered for a little while, my fingers going numb. No people, no sign of life, after a little while I turned and walked back, hands in my pockets.
Walking to his apartment i wore the black cap my mother knit for me, I waited at a corner for the light to change. The streets were mostly empty, a few cars, a yellow cab, the slow red line of a streetcar. Words and sentences swooped down on me, fell swirling. I thought about writing this. Silver light blurred distinctions between dawn and dusk, smearing beginnings and endings into one long colourless moment, threatening snow. I was cold; winter sharp enough to seep through my wool coat, sweater, skin, and touch the bone.
I opened my mouth as if to release a whisper, but did not say anything, did not make a sound to break the glass silence that held everything. I opened my mouth because I wanted to feel my lips open and close.
Words have wings.
I say the list to myself softly:
two bottles of sparkling water
pears
dark roast coffee
pumpernickel bread
cinnamon
his shopping list, a list of words like a poem.
Like;
Linen
Gloves
Night
Stutter
Cane
Red
Knife
Crossing over to his side of the street I wondered at the shape of language, how it can decipher the reality of my disposition.
Situation.
Context.
words felt close, gathered, as though I could reach out and touch them. The streetcar passed with a spark and rattle as the light changed. Sometimes he gives me things, books, clothes, a length of chain, a scythe, a hunting knife. Snow landed on my shoulders. For a time as I walk I don’t think about anything. The snow is fell harder, sliding from the sky in heavy tangles. I am not cold anymore, I am warm from the walking and thoughts of him, us. A bleeding warmth.
Our language was not designed to distinguish differences in kinds love. Our not our kind anyway. There is no way to speak our violence with out a complex qualifier. We have no words for welcome brutality, desired objectification. We are always trying to explain it with the opposite of itself and in doing so we run the risk of unraveling into meaningless lyricism, inexact metaphors.
I walk up the front step to his door, breathing the chill clear air by the lake. Somewhere a train rolled past, the wind cold and full of snow. I have his coffee and cinnamon in my shopping bag. I am sentimental about our memories.
Sentimentality, to feel. A word for the physical, an emotional memory.
Objects are things that hold but cannot feel emotion, which is where all the fantasy of objectification falls apart. People are the sum of their experiences, they remember, they feel, and in many cases these sensations are the same. So we carry all the things we don't have words for, not the way an object would, but the way person would. Like carrying something heavy with pride, because you are strong.
Because you can.