Fragments.

Alive Until Winter Ends

I didn't want to wear shorts and eat popsicles and get sunburned. I liked scarves, drops of rain on the window, hibernation and reading and the constant cold. I wanted to wear sweaters, and listen to sad songs. I wanted to stay inside, and for everyone else to do the same. I wanted to write ridiculous poems and spend an exceptionally long time tying up my boots. You can't do that in summer. You don't get to see the world coated white, or watch the flowers die.

I was not a depressed person.

Contrary to what many may have thought, I was happy and sane. I'd always been strange, liking things that separated me from everyone else, but that was who I was. I knew who I was more than I knew anything. The world stretched out, dipping in and out of logic, and I was right in the center of it, eyes wide, peering into whatever lay beyond the edge of my imagination.

It wasn't like I had some kind of traumatic experience that turned me off summer, I just didn't like it. It felt fake. Like a giant cardboard cutout, held in front of the scary world we lived in. It was orange and pink and yellow, and it was sickly sweet, and artificial. I always felt like summer was lying to me. Whispering fantasies of happy endings and laughter. But winter didn't pretend. It sliced into my heart, and told me everything I needed to survive. It let me know there was some truth in the people I'd been surrounded with my whole life. Winter and I were unlike everyone else. We could see where the colours went outside the lines.

People tended not to understand me, because they were too caught up with flimsy things that never truly mattered. Small falsities that would wrap around their necks like boa constrictors. People don't see without their eyes. Never have, never will. Much more of a person lies beyond their skin and flesh. A small flicker of being hides somewhere inside you, making you exactly who you have grown into being. Something easily painted over, until it no longer recognizes itself in the bathroom mirror. Something easily misplaced.

Among many things, I was a teenager. Alive, curious, obsessed with silly things, and always trying to know more. I wanted to be treated like an adult, even though small bits of me were clinging onto my childhood. People underestimated how scary it was; growing old. Being someone in a world of so many. Was I supposed to take care of myself? Because I had no fucking clue how to do that. But pride was a strong thing, and it keeps us in a maddening silence. We are forever stuck trying to choose the right moment to raise our voice. See what it sounded like after all these years. Did it even still work?

I was not a hateful person.

I loved many things. I liked to laugh, and watch silly sitcoms and draw pictures. I had friends, and I left the house all the time. To buy groceries, to go to the library, to go to the park, to ride my bike around town. But I was an introvert. I didn't want to spend my weekend out and about. I wanted quality time with F. Scott Fitzgerald and my typewriter. I wanted to do word searches, surf the web for bone chilling music, and one sentence stories that I could pin to my bedroom wall. And I'd never found anyone who could survive in the climate of my anti-social world, so I'd never tried bringing anyone in.

It was too risky. Letting people really see me. I didn't like attention, and I didn't like analyzing stares. I didn't want people thinking they'd figured me out, when they had no idea what kept my heart from stopping, why I never climbed tall trees, or why I only drew with black pens. Small things, hidden somewhere deep within my coat, kept me from ever truly belonging to someone. I didn't want to belong to anyone but myself. I didn't. I couldn't. I wouldn't.

Oh, but the promises one breaks.