I could feel it as soon as I opened my eyes that morning; the weight of winter heavy on my chest.
I cringed at the sound of ice crunching beneath my boots as I stepped out into the morning. Last week’s snow still coated the ground, lying dejectedly in dismal slushy heaps on the pavement, its original purity soiled by the gasoline and street salt which had failed to melt it. I made the same walk every day, playlists of the same songs to get me to the same places. I could feel goosebumps quickly creeping their way up my arms and legs, forming against the cheap fabric of my black tights, the ones my mother had told me not to wear in this kind of weather. I regretted wearing only a t-shirt beneath my jacket. The shirt was new, and I hated the color. It hung alien on my ribcage.
Thirty minutes later I found myself sitting in someone else's basement again, fingers fumbling for my pen cap as I admired the new drawings and words I had graffitied up and down my left arm in blue ink. My mother told me that drawing on yourself gives you blood poisoning, or maybe it was skin cancer, or maybe it was both. I still can't really remember. "In any case," she would tell me, "It makes you look trashy."
The television across from me was playing a british murder mystery with little to no interest. I had never noticed before now that televisions could even show interest, but winter, it seemed, had even managed to suck the energy out of inanimate objects. The sofa I was curled up on sighed underneath me, and the coffee table next to me had been converted into a graveyard for pistachio shells and candy wrappers, which, I noticed, someone had made a half-hearted effort to tidy; a few of the shells lay sunken and defeated in half empty glass of apple juice. My two best friends sat on either side of me, deeply enthralled in a discussion which, from what I could gather, seemed to be a thorough exploration of the word "paradox" and its definition.
"Paradox", the one read pompously off of his cracked phone screen, "is a situation, person, or thing that combines contradictory features or qualities." My eyes were fixated on the television , although I couldn't bring myself to watch the program. All of a sudden I was trapped inside this tiny basement, in this frozen city. I stood up with a start, pulling my jacket on.
"I'm going on a walk," I said. "I'll be back in a minute."
It was still daylight as I trudged up the basement stairs and out into the biting cold, but despite the brightness, the sun was nowhere to be seen. I leaned my head back and tried to look for it among the bleak white clouds, but the light stung just my eyes, leaving behind strange figures in my vision that dissolved away before I had the chance to actualize them. My mother told me never to look straight into the sun. "It will blind you", she said. The empty branches on the trees reached out desperately into the white sky, like they were searching for the sun as well.  I looked around me, overwhelmed by the colorlessness of the scene. The snow was just as gray as it was that morning, and I began to feel myself blending into the sludge. My tights, the ones my mother told me not to wear, had ripped, gaping holes that swallowed up bitter air and then the icy ground as I sat down cross-legged in the snow. Something about the monochromatic skyline, the stark contrast and the middling grays, sent me back to last winter; being shoved into doctors offices, taking dietary supplements every other minute. January had numbed more than just my fingertips. There would always be ways around it and ways to avoid it, I thought to myself, but winter would come around every year, and there was nothing to do but accept it. I need to go somewhere else, maybe. I need to see things differently, and I need to see different things.