No Sorrow For Seasons

Stirring White Russians for winter. Cheers.

August isn’t unkempt, for once. The light is vague but makes everything feel finalised. The world can be a theatre setting for your life or something like it. So I step out with purpose and emotion, caught smiling to myself outside on three separate occasions. Both of us looking at the sky as the snow falls and I’m beaming, and those three are all delicate-featured boys with shiny eyes. Aim to keep mine anywhere but theirs, feeling naive and half-witted. When I do, though (I can’t not), they’re smiling at me smiling. As the bleached bits fall from an ordinary silver sky, my teeth are exposed against my will and on three unplanned occasions, I’m met with a similar rhapsodic grin. All of us are kids, scrunching our shoulders up, putting our hands out, gazing with our necks naked at the clouds and dimpling our cheeks in an ignorance of maturity. Adults looking at the sky and smiling.

I’m really glad that I spend a lot of my days hastening around outside, walking to meetings. Thermals under jeans, feeling appropriate and up-for-it. Even my gums are cold.