2003-11-20 - 2:08 p.m.

Loneliness

I am wretchedly sick at the moment, and even a draft of cold air causes me pain enough to make me cringe. Motion hurts my joints and I can finally map out where all my tendons are based on the hyperstrings of useless pain-communication that they send out every time I move a major limb or adjust my head's position.

There's an inch and a half of snow outside -- first snow of the year to survive the rising of the sun. I cannot go outside for fear I would die, since any change in the air sets me to coughing and last time I was poorly-enough off to cough up blood felt a lot like this time. Don't think sub-freezing air would improve it.

She's gone now, and she loved the 11PM Dark Outside Snow we had a few weeks ago the weekend that she'd decided that she was going to leave in December (which got moved up for good and valid reasons, but it was the first point at which we'd acknowledged that it really wasn't going to work, so we were going out and doing everything that we could think of to have fun that weekend and in the weekends to come to add some positive thinking to the mix).

Snow fluttering down from nowhere a dozen feet up where the streetlights stopped revealing anything of value, and she made me reappreciate snow just by liking it and getting that rush that I vaguely remember getting from snow in childhood, before I knew it was wet and annoying and hurt my body in really unpleasant ways. And for awhile, I could enjoy it by proxy, and it was good.

Now there is an inch and a half of snow on the ground and I cannot go outside, but I would give a great deal to pull up the shades and watch her outside throwing snowballs at the window and trying to feed the squirrels.

That is my definition of the moment.

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