Preemptive Retaliation

I had a nice moment last night. I was round at a friends house for the evening, and he fed me some potent eggnog which would, later, result in me having the deepest sleep I’ve had this year, and at the end of it I was walking home through the night. It was a cold night, with a hint of fog clinging to the air, and it was strangely quiet. There were a few cars passing by, snaking their way down the roads with their red taillights streaming behind them like the bikes in Akira, and there were a few people milling around here and there. But it was quiet, and peaceful, and cold, and the whole world seem to press in on me.

When I was nineteen I moved from a flat in East Kilbride to a room in Glasgow with some friends from university. It was a tenement flat, with detailed cornices and windows that stretched all the way into the sky, and I had a room off a main road with a bar below it that always filled their bottle bin right as I was falling asleep. My first day in that flat I locked myself in my room and made it my own – unpacked my books and CDs, set up my typewriter, plastered the wall with posters – and that first evening my flatmate invited me out to a battle of the bands. It was a short walk to the ABC, and we listened to music and cheered along and had long life altering chats that only happen in the smoking area of venues. When the bands were done we filtered out into Sauchiehall Street to head home.

Between us entering and exiting the event, the sky had opened up and a thick layer of snow carpeted the road and pavement. The snow was still coming down in thick flakes, and we trudged our way back home, severely underdressed. The streets were silent, both with the lack of people and cars, but because the snow deadened everything, absorbing even our quiet chatter. Like last night the world was pressed in on me, as if we were the only things that existed. As if I was in a snowglobe.

It wasn’t snowing last night, but it would’ve been nice if it was. But for a while the world only existed for me. And not the me that’s in my head – fizzing, thinking, worrying, planning, fretting, etc – but a me that was outside of myself. A calming moment that reminds me why I actually love this season so much. I had the dark, I had the twinkling lights of other people’s trees, and the cold, and my soft footsteps.