Enter: Cold

The coldest day in decades.  Car making strangled sounds, wheels bumpy with frozen air.  Sunlight knifing the back of our throats.  On Facebook, videos of friends tossing pots of boiling into the air, liquid turning to snow in an instant.  Soap bubbles frozen before reaching the earth.  Nasal hairs stiff.  Tourniquets of cold on every arm, every leg.  We move as though each joint was locked, soldered into place. 

Carol came in her mink hat to watch you and Thisbe while I drove Daddy to his first day of class.  Then, while you slept, Thisbe and I sat on the leather couch, weaving our fingers thought the knit ivory blanket, reading a cartoon book about Sir Arthur.  The sword from the stone.  Potions disguising the beloved.  Dragons lurking under stones.  Bodies floating in biers down the river to Camelot.

You and I played with Emily and baby A in the library.  Baby A learning to walk.  Tiny shuffle steps.  Up and down in overalls.  Pushing a plastic bus in front of him like a cart.  Carrying around a Pooh Bear 3/4 his size.  And you sitting for five, six, seven minutes at a time.  Old man groans into your toe and ankle region.  Then wiggled dancing moves on your back.  Eyes following Baby A everywhere.

Thisbe and I reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at Blue Monday.  Hot chocolate in a blue mug.  What does miracle mean?  What is a risk?  I explain and she says oh a risk is like when you walk in the middle of the street and maybe you'll get hit by a car or you walk along the edge of a mountain but maybe you'll fall down the side and die or you put your piggy bank on top of a car and maybe someone comes by and eats it.  Yes, I say, exactly.

Chicken soup with coconut milk and edamame and corn and pepper for dinner.  The peeled mango is pale yellow, mealy, purplish near the pit.  You are frustrated at dinner.  Refuse to sit in your chair.  Spit out the tastes of sweet potato puree we spoon between your lips.  Thisbe can't find Princess Elsa in the bath.  Elsa's two plastic dresses lined up on the edge of the tub.  Rigid plastic so that they stand upright without a form inside them.  Thisbe swoops the bubbles away with her forearm, trying to clear a patch so she can see the doll's pale skin, her turquoise slippers.

In bed, now, I lean my head against the wall and feel the cold seeping through.  Even with hundreds of other people close by, even with blankets and space heaters, even with a stable dwelling and wood that could be burned in a pinch, we are taken back by the way it comes through everything, this cold, through fleece and wool and stucco and skin, glass and concrete and timber and down.  This is a different kind of vulnerability, not the kind that comes in the face of a typhoon or tornado, earthquake or tsunami.  I think of that town near the Chernobyl site, Pripyat, of everything static, still.  Of all of us going over to a glassy-eyed otherness, a place where our gestures slow and tumble and finally numb.