11°

It's so cold this morning my fingers feel stiff and clumsy as I type and my penmanship sucks more than usual. This is one of those mornings that brims with scintillating dreams that ripple up against the dam of frustrations of a peripatetic who is only here, still. So I retreat into a decade-old memory of sitting on a platform in Canterbury on a bright winter morning, waiting for the train to London to come in, shivering and writing an old-fashioned pen-on-paper letter to some one I love(d) and telling him how strange it was to struggle to move the pen across the page. It was important to me, in that white sunshine, to understand this cold, to feel it completely without giving into it. So I wrote to him about it with my fingers freezing inside my gloves. Looking at the scrawled lines I wondered whether he would be able to read what I had written, and also what I had not written -- of the lasting warmth and moments of heat I wished to pass between us. Now I understand that the letters we wrote to each other were not the same letters that arrived on our separate doorsteps.