The purple velvet of the crepe myrtles has long since fallen and washed away. Their flowers littered the ground like a fuchsia carpet before the golden leaves of fall blew in. The rains came and glaciated to their naked branches in clear coats. They shimmy in the wind now, clacking their frozen tendrils together like bamboo wind chimes. The world is quiet and untouched apart from their gentle, ever-present melody.

My head is down against the cold. I hardly feel it as it slows the blood in my veins like a viscous molasses. I imagine it can be tapped from me now like sweet syrup. My pinkened face can’t remember the last time it took the hue from the sun’s unfiltered reign. My body has lost the memory of the sensation of over warmth. I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t cold.

But the sun will thaw the land and lord over our humble Earth soon enough. Its heat trapped under a watchful atmosphere, we’ll curse its inhospitable sway. We’ll wake in the night splayed out like specimens. We’ll retreat from shaded spot to shaded spot, head down against its ruinous rays. We won’t remember what it felt like to be cold. We’d do anything to feel the sensation of a shiver down our spines.

We are creatures of absolutes. Consumed in the moment so entirely, we can’t imagine anything beyond it. Sometimes we can’t even make out all that is in it. We grasp at some semblance of light at the end of the tunnel. Some escape from our own filling in of the blanks. We don’t know when we’ll be free of what has dominion over us. And so we do what we can to influence it. What we seldom realize is that what there will be, will come anyway. It’s us that won’t arrive as we expected.