1:05 PM
I feel comfortable here. According to a quick google before I went outside, the temperature outside the windows of my car is forty nine degrees. Overcast skies, one would say a feeling of coziness exists for me here. I know this feeling is short lived, I know I’ll have to go back, I know I’ll have to open the door, turn and face the cold, but for now, I’m cozy.
As I look out at the parking lot, a black car blocks my view in the stall across from mine. I utilize the passenger's seat for extra legroom and the interestingly unfamiliar feeling of being in a side of this car other than the driver's seat.
How did I get here? I’m not sure, I just know I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to go back to the place of darkness and cold. I don’t want to descend below ground where light is even more scarce than the overcast skies above me.
Something other than the cold exists in that place, something I cannot find the right words for. A sort of lonely sadness, mixed with a bit of nostalgia for something I can’t remember. I don’t feel like searching hard for the word because I don’t want to think about that place, and I’d be forced to do so in order to find the right word.
For now I am safe, I am away even if briefly. I dread the inevitable drag of the record player needle pulling the present back to a place where I am no longer here, no longer across from that black car, warmed by what little warmth somehow made the journey 93 million miles that last bit through dense cloud cover and into my car becoming trapped behind glass.
Perhaps the warmth doesn’t feel trapped, perhaps the warm is like me. Feeling cozy in here until the blanket of the outside world’s chill envelopes it into non existence.
The world will begin to die soon, as it does every October. I don’t look forward to this process, a reminder of the needle of time always moving closer to the end. With each cycle a fresh layer of fallen leaves, snow covered earth, the chill of early spring and the budding of new leaves, and at last the first warm breaths of summer, followed quickly by unrelenting heat. The heat slowly dissipates as the leaves start to turn and then fall once again.
I save this file, even close it, only to reopen it yet again. I have nothing more to say, nothing more to type, just sit and wait to pull that door handle and face the cold, on my own.
