Snow.

New York is cold. Getting out of the subway at nearly seven the sky is still almost light (as it’s never entirely dark here) because of the city’s life and the fog that has crept in making it a soft grey, the kind that encompasses you right before a snowfall. Walking down Lexington towards home it’s easy to still feel like this place isn’t really home at all.

There are of course the same buildings and the same street corners and the same kinds of people that I pass just to make it through those blocks, all those long stretches of pavement so I can climb the stairs and open the door to the place that’s supposed to make me feel safe. The place that has all of my books and clothes and shoes I can’t really afford. It has my computer and photographs and records. But what does that even mean? Can home really just be the place where the tangible objects of your life are? Can it just mean to be walls and a roof and a place to rest your head?

Certainly, (I thought as I walked closer to the place that had been mine for nearly two years now), certainly it must mean more.

For the beginning of December the air is chill and the snow is falling softly. I dig my hands deeper into my pockets as I walk, (a gesture being recreated all over this city) passing people together holding hands or walking dogs or pushing strollers. They have all come from somewhere and are going towards somewhere else. Eventually, as the hour inches later, (past dinner time coffee and cocktails), they’ll all be wanting the same thing - they’ll all be wanting home.

Seasons are strange, aren’t they? In summer it’s never hot enough until is, and then it’s unbearable. In winter it’s always just too cold, a chill that seeps deep into your bones and doesn’t leave ‘til spring. But not now. Now as I walk towards nowhere in particular it feels like the change of the seasons and their inevitable inability to never be what you want them to be at the exact moment you think do - reminds me of home.

Home is the most important place in the world, but its an ever-changing place on unstable ground, and its meaning shifts with the passing of time. (Could it be?) every second of every minute of every day what happens and what decisions are made, (the verdict of luck that is drawn with or without our approval), all take part in taking the definition of the one place that is supposed to make the most sense in our lives, and forces it to take on an entirely new and unrecognizable shape.

I’m not ready for snow. As a kid you always were and knew when it was going to strike, an ability of detection that was inherent. It was a sixth sense of internal excitement because snow meant then so much more than it could ever mean now. Then, it was snow without jobs without stress without bills without rent. It was snow without heartache without loss without loneliness without pain.

Now its whiteness falls on to our tainted grown-up world and rests there as a mere memory of all that we can’t get back, of all that we’ve lost. If only, snow makes us think now. If only, if only, if only.

Snow now, I suppose (no matter where you end up at the end of the day), is hope.