After living the previous 3 years in cities that experience winter in name only, this year finds me in a city that just had its first notable snowstorm. Snow is piled up in ghost white mounds and car owners are digging their vehicles out with shovels and fits of frustration. Deep puddles fill my Sambas with icy water when I miss a step and my nose drips with the coercion of whipping winds. The last time I felt this type of weather, I was living in Chicago and I wasn’t even halfway through with this project.

Now I’m a year out from reaching the horizon.

It’s good to be cold. It’s good to be uncomfortable, to feel the pain of cracked skin and chapped lips. It’s good to feel the tears well in your eyes from the sheer force of nature’s chill. And it sucks all the same.

For, it has begun again. It didn’t come on as early as some years, and it hasn’t struck with the same debilitating sweep that it did last year, but it’s here all the same. Gray skies, bundled bodies and frosty air are a sharp knife for a person with seasonal affect disorder, all the more so when it’s part of the larger cycle of bipolar disorder.

I feel the desire to push people away, to get quiet, shut out and shut down, sitting like an audience member shouting at the screen, “Don’t go in there!” The mind is a sordid bitch.

Oh well.

I’m okay. You’re okay?

I know what this is. I know what this will be. I know that it’ll be here for a while, then it won’t, then it will again, then… ad nauseam. So it goes.

I don’t know what will come of it this year, what bridges I’ll burn, who will avert their gaze, who will shrug and bury it. It’s not always who you expect, it’s not always who you hope…

It’s winter in Boston. There’s snow on the ground, and though some days will be warmer than others, with occasional sunlit interludes, I know there will be more snow to come, more clouds, more days-like-night. We live in cycles.

So it goes.