Blind winter

The room always bears the winter discontent. It leaves the hangars stiff, hanging inertly behind the forgotten cupboards. They go there quietly in November, all three of them, as the summer mould lifts away from everything, revealing a cold, dry bitterness that smells like fresh cement- slowly filling the air, setting quickly. I don’t bother myself with it though. I am content in my three coats; perhaps in the assurance of their mutual gratitude for having been rescued from their steel and wood summer coffins. In the tepid whiff of red whiskey and in these three coats I have found my pleated past very comforting in its familiarity. There is obviously very little colour in my November. I can remember it that way for the longest time now. Buildings have replaced ochre mud huts on my horizon, my moseying fields lay frozen in the sudden company of the stillness as the sun watches ashen faced and my auburn sky seems yet unpainted- a shaft of ice appears to have blanketed her- shielding her canvas this winter again. The mighty town down the valley appears, disappears and reappears behind the icy fog without a face. Perhaps in hasty remembrance that it lays buried under the pallid burden of history’s cold promise. But where I most often sit- here in my room- the fog cannot help but watch me buried away instead in my coats, in the asylum that nostalgia offers each year this time. But then again, everything seems to have quietened rather severely inside the room. Silence seems to have established itself rather unabashedly. Those things that once hummed and sounded to mark their presence, like the motor fan above me somewhere, now hang in a resolute coma. And over time, as the frost colonises everything it touches, silence itself begins to settle along the floorboards, hovering there for a bit and then slinking away rather furtively, like vapour, through the clefts along its rows. In its place there is nothing. Nothing moves, nothing sounds. What remains is an emptied mesh of time and space rendered worthless and destitute, distanced and divided into infinite parts of meaninglessness. This nothingness, falling between any two things, might well be infinitesimal in itself, devoid of anything as it is- even silence; but it seems to have pushed the perspective between things so far apart now. And suddenly everything seems further from everything. The fan from the ceiling, the ceiling from the floor, the velvet backed armchairs from the wooden table, the stiff country cigars from its blunt clipper, the blue ledge from the ocean above which there is very little fog hours before twilight. The ledge seems the farthest though from where I sit. It seems so close otherwise and I have spent many years gazing through the window there. But it hasn’t been so for many years too. Though when I close my eyes much firmly then others would believe to be necessary, I can see what must be on the other side of that window. And even though I can never go close, from the distance, I have caught, once in a while, the sight of little blue vessels ferrying past the misty glass canvas, leaving tufts of black smoke and blaring once in a while. In the winter, even the tiny blue vessels let me down. I wonder if the sea too has decided to congeal with the rest. There is nothing there either. No sight and no sound that man or any other creature can add now. Except what has always been there. In this irony, everything has been abruptly silenced so that veiled in the calm of sobriety, there breathes in everything a passive foreboding. A dying urge that settles in each thing, only to vain further, leaving a static rationality that is disquieted by its own reflection in the other. So when I close my eyes, the room always bears the winter discontent. But then again, there is nothing about winter apart from the serene darkness when I open my eyes to the blind world before me. Who is blind then? I wonder, I weep.