Winters are often remembered for long nights, heavy air, fog-laden darkness, and the misty marks they leave upon the thoughts of many thinkers, I think. They become the season of longing for hopeless romantics. Suddenly everyone seems to be on a bench in the dark woods. Alone. Searching for something, watching the road for a passerby. Yet if the trees and the bench remain unchanged, why do people only return there on certain cold winter evenings?
Is there something in the season itself? The weather, perhaps, the way the air subtly changes each winter? Or is it the smoke, which, once inhaled, turns into an addiction and tugs us back to the same bench, night after night? Even if we put winter – and that long, patient waiting – aside, what is it that shifts our sight, so that we see and imagine things through a different, softer lens in this season?
What strange alchemy in falling leaves and drifting flakes lends them their melancholy? Why does an unexpected winter dusk kindle the impulse to step out of the house and walk the empty road? To let the hard wind press against the soft flesh of the face, to beg the wintry sails to soothe the summery tides that roar and drown within.
A Window. Window stained with winter’s moist haze, beads of water clinging to its thick pane, bears witness to the harsh, icy winds raging outside. You sweep your hand across the glass, forming a colorless rainbow that briefly unveils the world beyond. It is cold out there. Undeniably wintry. But it is not sorrowful. There is no sorrow outside. There is no grief outside. The grief is within.
Whatever the reason, the bitterness is inside, and we search for its remedy outside. Sometimes the long restlessness since summer pushes us to set foot beyond the threshold and wander the streets.
We know there won’t be many people out; the streets, engulfed in darkness, stand alone. So we can find and fit ourselves into the darkness. Just like placing the last missing puzzle piece and feeling that quiet satisfaction.
The dimness within settles into the street’s rough dullness. And out in the dark, one feels most at home. That’s how some wandering bastards never come back home.They step outside again and again, every other day, every other night, into the wind. Into the abyss.
To look for something which was never lost in the first place, but could never be found afterward.
