The last dose of Summer always captivates me the most. It is as if this is a wrap-up and the world is telling you it's time to forget about it all and enter another stage. We revisit to unvisit. We go back to put down the pieces where they're supposed be. Indifference has outgrown me in the past few months because I took myself out of a linage. I've been nothing else but detached with my inner world and connected to the external world. And now the final bits of Summer come to remind me that soon I'll have to reconnect with myself. I'd come back from the journey of figuring out who I really am and it was both rewarding and terrifying. I've been picking up the fragments, as if I was the third-party, of each moment I spent in life from my very own museum and re-arranging them to see if I could make something new out of them. The kid playing piano downstairs is getting louder and the beams on the glass are growing dimmer. This moment is fading away. If it was a person I would have left scratch marks on him. I was the type who would never let go without putting up a fight. But I feel like I'm perhaps too old for that at my age now. There's still so many inarticulate feelings I should've radiated in a particular time and setting and now it's coming to an end. There are so many things I have fixed but somehow still broken when I put them back in the right spot in my museum.
When Winter comes, everything becomes a charade. A perfect pretense, a fabricated version of Summer. Excessive layers of stitches have us cloaked from the external world. Our pulses muffled under warmness and everything that moves seems a little less sensible. Even the air is frozen, and everything in it just stagnates. Our internal realities are reduced and condensed into miniature, extending the distance between souls, making communication almost impossible for a divided nation.
It's funny how we classify people that have different preferences of seasons into different categories. We do exhibit one persona in Summer and another in Winter. It's only in recent months that I've started to understand the art of mastering different characters during different times. Summer is full of movements, and maybe that's why they're our distractions from paying attention to ourselves. Even heartbreaks seem less noticeable when we're too caught up in that moment to feel sorry for ourselves. But in Winter even the lights are frozen, they don't move. That's when we notice how the papercut from Summer got a slice too deep and that the pain is going to grow worse.
I'm a Summer person. Winter makes me uncomfortable because I'm sick of tapping into my own consciousness. And the décors everywhere are just awfully staged with a touch of paleness. Intimacy becomes distant but distance is worse. I remember a few years ago I called up this boy when some of my insignificant wounds started to grow wider. Being around people made me feel less like I was alone in an igloo. We lived pretty close to each other. It was late at night and we were smoking in his balcony. We were so quiet the only thing that could be heard was our steady pulses in our veins underneath several layers of clothes. In Winter I don't speak. I struggle with words to say. And he understood that, too. After a cigarette, we went back into his house where the temperature was slightly warmer. I tip-toed into his room barefoot and the marble floor stung me with coldness regardless. A moment later we were under warm covers and he was so close to me that his teeth were the size of piano keys. "You gotta learn to fill the distance with people that are less important than him," he said. I didn't know what to say, because I understood. Sometimes I think that the degree of our understanding of the external world is negatively related to our ability of expressing our internal world.
He walked me home and the whole time he kept talking while I nodded whenever he made small pauses. He wore his heart on his sleeve but both of us had our hands in our pockets.
Winter is a battle between two worlds.
