Big wet flakes fall through the air, their paths crossing and swaying in the breeze. Nothing is sticking because the ground is still too warm. Besides, the temperature couldn’t be any colder than just freezing.
I remember watching the snow from my third story room in Batchelder dorm in high school. My roommate and I didn’t get along, and he spent long periods away, forever cradling a ball back and forth in a lacrosse stick. I spent too much time alone at my desk in our room, staring out the window at the quad. When the first snow came, I opened the window and reached out and let it fall and melt on my hand. Each flake was a pinprick of cold. And then I sat down on the white futon and listen to the silence of the evening. With hundreds of classmates all around me, I was alone for the first time.
The snow fills the air all around, and it its volume makes real the great distance that separates me from everyone–former friends, sometimes friends, family, the people I was too shy to meet at all, and of course Ang in New York. I think it’s snowing up there, too. The ties that connect me to others are so thin and weak. Even the first snow, not much more than flurries, easily obscures them. Perhaps the cooling temperature makes them brittle and they break.
Thankgiving alone. It was inevitable because I am always alone and deserved because I am always ungrateful.
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