Brokedown Metaphors

If my psyche is a place, it is cold now. The harvest is in, all coins and bundled bills this year, with very little for the library, and even less the drying bamboo which would be used to prop up those egocentric statues of reapings past. The winter sets in, greedy evening gobbling up the clock earlier and earlier, and an axial tilt wringing the warm embrace from the air.

Summertimes, Oakland can feel like a lover. A body wrapped around my own, breathing through my clothes, tousling my hair; it all feels thicker and safer. A prophylactic blanket between me and worries.

This cold is so unnatural. It's nothing, in the grand scheme, hotter than the winters of my childhood; those of college. But I'm by myself. Cold in my head and in my heart—cold where it counts. It feels metaphoric. I shake. I cough and clear my throat, but my extremities don't go numb, and no fog hits the air as I breathe.

The amorous heat of the summer seems to make sense, then, surrounded by smiling faces. It's not kinetic energy, not an ambient movement in the twitching molecular sea. It's companionship and reaching out. It's the embrace of a mother, the touch of a playful evening's passion.

When I say I am cold within my psyche—that I've harvested my last lovely thought—I mean that I am reaching out. Cold is not the condition of lacking, it's the signal that it is time to seek improvement. Standing in the shower that extra few moments, or lingering at the desk of a coworker before you punch the clock: these are one in the same. To cocoon in my blankets is a sure sign of my bleak need for allies.

We can only warm one another.