I mean, it’s great, don’t get me wrong. This winter is cartoon-style lovely and enjoyable, I’m basically living in a gingerbread house surrounded by sugar, I’m FINE.
But there is an ache behind my sternum where the sun used to be.
It’s a hollowness, a weird internal vacuum that places barely perceptible but constant pressure on your lungs and heart. When I think about The Sun my breath catches and sort of grinds to a halt, pressure builds up, and I end up grimacing. Or else this vast sinkhole of loneliness opens up and I want to cry.
It’s so fucking weird.
This is my fourth or fifth winter up here, but it’s the first time I’ve spent the whole of the darkest months without ever Getting Out. Honestly, I was pretty stoked to see it – I’ve seen the edges of it, I’ve seen the sun go and I’ve seen it come back, but I’ve never stayed while it was just Gone. What was it going to be like? How dark was it going to get?
And OK, so it’s not dark all the time, it’s just not. Every day, even the darkest days, there’s a chunk of time that’s fully daylight. Not sun-high-in-the-sky daylight, but daylight. Bright blue sky, sure. But we’re talking two, three hours. Maybe four. It’s pitchy dark until 11am, and back that way by 5. And on either side of the few hours of day are these long, slow, deep blue slides from one into the other. It’s eerie, and calming, and sweet, and slow, and I love it.
The problem is it’s been a million years since the sun has been on my skin, or in my eyes. I remember the summer like it was a fever dream, malarial and pulsing. I wonder what will happen when I see the sun again, if it’s going to be like what they warn you about after a blackout, how you should unplug your stuff so that when the power surges back it doesn’t fry all your circuits and blow all your fuses. I dunno, maybe that was fifty years ago tech and I’m a person not a house – but I’m worried all the same.
Last year, when I left in mid-December, it was 16 degrees and sunny in Vancouver and when I got out of the airport I took my coat off and sat in the sun and I laughed for like fifteen minutes straight. Not even exaggerating: by myself on a curb outside the baggage claim, laughing. Nonstop. For fifteen minutes. I must have looked like a lunatic. God, I felt like a lunatic.
I think most people in Canada understand this, to one degree or another. All you have to be is “Employed At Coffee Shop During February/March” to know the cock-eyed joy that geysers up through a city on the first sunny, promise-of-spring day. People are all high as kites, and grinning, and loopy, and those days are the best. There’s something fundamental and biological happening there, and we all feel it.
Well, try this.
I mean it, it’s great, I honestly think you should – I think (and I’m most assuredly biased), that everyone should spend one crazy no-darkness summer and one cozy snow-cupcake winter up here. Like I say, I live in a gingerbread house, and the other night (hey, new years, whaddya know) I was at an even MORE gingerbread-y and magical winter cabin, this one buried in snowforest. Take a vast and terrifying snowscape of emptiness and pines, and put a little ice-cream scoop of wooden village on a hillside. Every house tucked deep in the trees, every woodstove ablaze.
See?
It’s really, really great here.
It’s just, I miss the fucking sun.
Tall Stories, Tiny Lies 