Apricity

It is in the cold barrenness that forgets.  It is the cold tile on the feet.

It is the movement from a warming bed to a graying morning that tugs at you to remain.

To come back, to rejoin. 

It is desertion. 

It is the unoccupied space.  It is the echo of footsteps on a winter road.

 It is the cold seat of a car left overnight.

 It is the first breath in a frost-laden landscape.

 It is a lonely chill wrapping itself around you.

It is a walk alone beneath a dead-stone moon.  It is a wind that carries no scent but of something empty. 

It is an opened Christmas box, tattered beside a garbage can.

It is an icicle, snapped in half.  It is the gray of roadside snow.

It is the melted ice, stuck to the bottom of the shoe, dripping into a puddle of cold.

It is the chill of a window, to a nose, breath fogging below, blurring the outside. 

It is the brunt of brake lights, mirrored in wet pavement, through a sleet covered windshield.

It is black dust of a dead fire.

It is the cold stillness on the steering wheel. 

It is the wistfulness of a brief sky before becoming cloud-covered, snuffing out stars that poured cold-light.

It is stepping out of a shower into cold bathroom air, the towel too far to reach.

It is the sound of the door closing off the warmth of the home to the cloying cold of a morning.

It is the clutch of winter, dead hands, dead heart, closing its grip upon me.

Until that moment, that one scintillating incandescent moment when I see you…

And I forget that I was ever cold.