how to survive winter.

How to get to new york, part fourteen

Thanks for reading How to get to new york season 2, brought to you by this laptop here and a couple dozen cups of coffee some of which were piping hot and most of which were forgotten at my desk for probably too long. If you want to read more from the series, including last season’s efforts (from Summer/Fall 2024), you can find it in full here.

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Having figured dinner parties fall under the unwritten Habeas Corpus that hangs dry and sordid over places like Chicago in January, I went slipping and sliding down Lincoln Avenue to a dinner party hosted above a doggy daycare outfitted like a Starbucks that smelled like a sandwich shop.

I dodged past an elderly man in a bright red ski suit cruising downhill on cross country skis while I was stepfooting across the street, trying like hell not to slip. He had come rocketing down along the bike path, making it really hard not to slip, yelling like hell wearing round dark goggles and a wide mouth with teeth bared. I watched him disappear over the hill, the dopler effect moving off and away, and I felt a chill like a draft had seeped through my jacket.

Snow came down in sheets and bursts and spurts and waves and concertos and ensembles and shy horsehair strings played quick but without resin, pale whispers and greyed colors grow like shadows. Winter. The most wonderfull time of the yeaaar! The most winter of winters. Cars slid into red lights. The line between the sidewalk and the road became smooth white patted down by footsteps and plows. Because plows went by, making a godawful noise and pushing together white mounds at intersections, each shaped like the sphinx — a separate sphinx for each intersection, all across Chicago. Tight huddles passed me by in the general shapes of people going the other way, michelin men of down and polyester I imagined throwing themselves into cardboard boxes when they returned to their apartments and mini houses. They could ship themselves off somewhere warmer, anywhere warmer, after paying a small fee.

The street was in a shadow and some sun hit the buildings piercing through the clouds painting the brick gold. Seasonal affective disorder (SAD) hits me like a cinder block from an overpass. Nostalgia for the sun. When the memory of the sun seeps away, where does it reappear? In the dark? Late winter is a sludge salted served under clouds. Everything’s dark, clouded, mumbled. Fumbling with gloves I can’t think to use my phone on long walks like this. It’s just me and a barren gray city as gray as it’s ever going to be. It’s a sad eternity. Winter is the oldest season by far. On wandering meanders around the neighborhood I’ll pass by a set of footprints in the snow, marks from the same thrifted Pumas I’m wearing now, and it takes me a small moment to remember these are my shoes. I’m going in circles, it seems. As if this snow and I have met before… Snow remembers footsteps longer than a puddle could ever imagine.

Underneath the sun so painting the dull world I thought to myself Well, if I can’t find peace here at least allow me a bitter glory until I can find peace again. And I spent twenty minutes picking out socks for this dinner party. I shaved and everything.

There’s nothing like a gathering of twelve friendly strangers to warm a place up. Warm like the inside of a glove, lined with rabbit fur. Warm like the insides of a bed. Warm like bottles of wine on bottles of wine. Warm like candlesticks. Warm like The Incredible Shrinking Man playing in the flat screen with the sound off. I— brought his camera along. S—, in the other room, finished chopping cucumbers, brought the bowl to the center of the table. D— poured another glass of wine. B— had brought Oreos (a rare example of a vegan and gluten free snack). and L—, having recently secured a job after months of a dire and desperate unemployment, sat celebratory in the center of the table.

At the very start of things, the winter still feeling young and fresh — the classic early December feeling — the snow coming down outside was still more of an aesthetic than it was an existential threat or all-consuming greyness. The conversation was good enough that I can hardly remember any of it looking back. Such is the sign of a good time that cotton balls grow around memory.

Just past I— and S— sat a large mexican-american man with a small mustache and a comically overfilled glass of wine, who had had a hellish fall, it seemed like. C—, as it turned out, had grown up with his grandfather, rather young for a grandfather, a man who took to both a strong penchant for Chardonnay and an overwhelming thirst which went well beyond it. C— himself avoids sparkling white wines specifically because of this. He claimed the affliction to clear wine is a genetic trait and so he avoids the stuff like the plague. He explained to us, “white wines represent a promise impossible to fulfill whereas reds are more comfortable in themselves. You know?” We nodded somewhat. L— sat back and threw his hands up.

C—’s old man, as he continued to explain, was in the business of selling trash compactors and other large metal things that constricted and contracted and rumbled and shook when in use, heavy machinery that shouldn’t be operated while under the influence, even the smallest bit. The smallest he sold direct from factory was a line of pastel colored garbage disposals; the largest was an industrial furnace the size of a Dollar General. This business created a bit of a conundrum for his grandfather, the alcoholic geriatric that he was, as he himself wasn’t legally allowed to operate any of what he sold. But this contradiction ended neatly as he came up with now-copyrighted tagline “I’m too drunk to touch any of this!” on his business cards, a phrase which, believe it or not, had bumped up the overall sales of waste disposal systems by 3% even if it caused a 0.8% drop in sales of cardboard compactors for whatever reason.

When the old man finally died, C— had been left quite a hefty inheritance in place of any real memories of the man. Three different nannies had raised him. He mentioned then that his biological parents resurfaced a couple months ago, tried to make amends for not being a part of C—’s life, and had wrecked havoc on his social life by asking him repeatedly for money, showing up at bars where he worked and taking free drinks until they were sloppy and falling all over the place off of white wine, and now he considered himself lucky, he said, that he had come out of the encounter in one piece and not crashing out considerably.

The heart is truly made of strong stuff; it’s nothing soft, oh great wad of muscle the heart. Like the human being, the heart is not only a stone island but a canoe of meat too. You and I are both bound together to this brute fact: we are both flesh surrounding an archipelago of organic rock, these bones. How mortifying a thought to be only flesh and bone. It’s a fear-realization feeling natural in the dog days of winter. We’re all in this together, though, at the very least, and that includes the trees showing us their skeletons.

Across the table from C—, still sipping his red wine, B— stood from her chair and scooped green beans onto a china plate. In college, she said later in the night, she wanted nothing more than to be a prolific enough marine biologist to one day release a coffee table book filled with underwater photography, nature facts, findings, the works, etc., only to give up on the dream of marine biology once and for all after her summer internship two years back involved taking four dead dolphins out of the massive plastic bags which they were collected in on a beach near Fort Lauderdale to poke at and prod with metal tools and rods to test their blubber for Fentanyl.

Around the same time as the dolphin postmortem (which came back very, very positive, I might add), her boyfriend of four years had texted “you don’t love me do you,” and their relationship had slowly evaporated under the Florida sun over the course of four months. It was apparently a long four months. Untangling visions of the future into something new to knit — perhaps a scarf — she had been taking her time since graduating to reconfigure herself and figure out a new set of aspirations. She was still, from what she was saying, trying to figure out a new cross-section for herself to stitch.

In terms of people around the table who’d had fantasies detatch themselves, I— had made the move to New York in the early spring of last year only to spend the entire summer and fall urgently rushing door dash orders from restaurants to apartments to try and pay for half a bedroom the size of a broom closet. Phone in his hand on his bike without having much time to look around him and take in the city he’d always dreamed of living in, he dodged Eric Adams’ select breakdancing corps of the NYPD who had the time of their lives last summer, blocking streets and gathering up crowds of tourists to gather and gawk and attempt audience participation with the tourist families all together singing Bruno Mars’s Uptown Funk while he was simply trying to get this Five Guys burger to a seventh floor apartment on the upper East side while it was still warm and it was a rare feat that he could pull off such a thing in the central crammings of Manhattan. He realized gradually with his own two eyes and ears, New York City might be dead huh. Since he moved back to Chicago, he’s taken to running dinner parties and scheming out an indie monthly print publication that could fill coffee shops because he can afford food here.

I was taken aback by all this. Everyone was telling the rest about themselves in such sincerity. I was surprised how startling it was to hear anyone narrate their own personal tragedies to a group of friendly strangers! My only story of the night was from my old apartment, back when I was nineteen. My bedroom was a former attic space attached to the apartment below, the stairs leading down to the living room which was being used at the time by one of my roommates to watch a long stream of Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes with the girl he was seeing on the couch next to him. They were sharing an ice cream pail and I had to use the bathroom so terribly that my feet paced themselves back-and-forth in my room where I had been trying to sleep a couple minutes before, too embarrassed and coy to make my appearance like a dark specter in the living room to have to pee again, and because I had already gone pee an hour earlier and didn’t want to have to make justifications for my weak bladder, which soon began stabbing me with spikes. Underneath the sound of Larry David saying “pre-ttay pre-ttay pre-ttay good.” coming through the door, I pissed into a potted aloe vera I kept by the stairs. The plant later died from this disgusting affront to its integrity and later I switched my major to Botany for three semesters, I think because I was trying to make amends and I have always loved plants but never been good with them…

After I had finished this story to a rather silent table (I had been hoping for what? A laugh?), we all sat around contented and plump from all the wine and gyros and we noticed the snow falling outside had only increased in its falling. It drew our eyes one at a time. The window was a white sheet; waves of snow brushed against it ever so softly as the flakes were big. We stood and gathered around the pane, looking out on the Chicago streets having become a barren wasteland of snow with the occasional snowmobile whizzing past or a CTA bus dutifully blowing through, half submerged in the white. The city seemed empty, abandoned. It felt vaguely apocalyptic. The sun had set fully. “I guess I can text my parents I won’t be making it home for the holidays,” B— said under her breath. The waters were rising, only they were frozen and crystalline.

I don’t mean to cause any trouble by saying it, but people used to be happy here in Chicago. Only a few months ago the city was teeming with life. The summertime, the falltime, even Halloween, all of it is wonderful here in the city. I have to hope deep down that the people here will be happy again here, one day.

The winter is a cruel joke. Who can really say they’re cozy in the wintertime when they’ve filled their lives with such busywork and mandatory distraction that they build a moat around themselves, keeping them from ever truly knowing themselves? To survive winter I drown myself in media and weed and nicotine.

The sun reflects off of the snow three stories below my bedroom, blanketing the space in an unnerving whiteness. While the summer sun makes for an ecstatic companion, so elastic like a rubber band, the winter sun is a dreadful florescent overhead: life support for the Earth. The winter sun is behind this, I want to say, ignoring the tilt of the Earth. It’s because of the winter sun that this time as dark and cold a meditation of the futility of life as only a mid-century hospital is really capable of.

And worse, the winter makes me into a mummy. I feel geriatric in the winter; deeply depressed at worst, mildly anxious at best. Mealy mouthed, dried out, decomposed, I shuffle to close my curtains every morning. The sun is a cold laser. I’m a corpse. Am I sinking? I am sinking. Am I floating? I am floating. Which would be worse? I’m not the one to ask. How to survive winter? Clean your room: there’s your easiest answer. If you want a more complex one, get out of your apartment for a bit. Find somewhere else to be bored.

And I found a good place to be bored that night of the dinner party and when such a thing happens, night loses its situation within time and time itself begins to transpire in secret. The unbearable block between my eyes and my brain that develops in the winter had dissolved when confronted with other people’s own blocks dissolving. What an idea. Solidarity against poor weather and brain fog.

We forgot about the window and returned to our conversation, the night became morning and the morning became night again and we were still seated, all of us still around the table, the food still fresh, and the wine still pouring like the snow still poured outside, clouding up the windows and the whole world felt contained. No one wanted to leave. A question floated unacknowledged in the air too as to whether we could leave. The outside world became more and more clearly inhospitable the longer we sat around the table. The snow was certainly well past the door in and out of the apartment complex by this point. Before we knew it the clock had made two rounds and with the sun setting, as it does, ushering in a second night of the same dinner party, the dogs downstairs in the doggy daycare began to howl and whine and winnow their voices and we joined them, wine mad, howling, and the dogs downstairs waited a beat before responding in turn.

But: “wait, did you hear that?”, I— asked. We wall went quiet except for B— who broke into a coughing fit from all the howling. We waited, and there it was again: a slight, tinny hum. From the floorboards. “I think it’s coming from… over here.”

S— crouched in the corner, pointed to one of the floorboards. I— nodded. S— pulled up a board from the floor and looked at us for a moment, smiling. It sounded like a phone in the floorboards. It was a phone in the floorboards. He pulled out an iPhone 4 covered in dust out from the floorboards with two fingers, rumbling off the dust, a comically small phone now in today’s age of giant (but so so thin) consumer electronics. He placed the phone on the table between a bowl that had once contained chopped tomatoes and a half-emptied half-gallon of Yellow Tail pink moscato. We all gathered around the phone, baffled and chatting. Manic, exasperated… Shane was calling. Shane?

After the buzzing stopped, we noticed “Shane” had left over two hundred messages over the past eight years. There was no passcode on the phone — “Were there even passcodes on phones back then?” I wondered out loud — and the background was still the iOS “blueprint” wallpaper which framed the apps which gleamed like light was reflecting on them. The phone hadn’t apparently been updated since 2012 but the two hundred or so messages had kept track of time since, ranging from innocuous “how are you?”s and “hey”s to more assertive “Hey”s, almost all of which came from this Shane number

the iOS 6 “blueprint” wallpaper — a classic.

And since everything before 2012 had been wiped from the phone, whatever this relationship had once been, we could only see it in its far away, one-sided echo. Whatever it had been, and it very much was a “had been”, it had apparently driven whoever owned the phone to bury it deep in the floorboards. I’d never seen anything like it.

“Shane” left a new voicemail then, while we were all crowded around the phone like a pack of chimpanzees having discovered an ipod in their travels and having heard American Idiot for the first time, we’re now hooting and hollering, excited suddenly at this notification for the voicemail from this Shane guy. We listened: “Hey Georgia, I’m really not in a good place right now, if you could pick up I would love to…”

And we didn’t end up doing much anything with the phone. There was a moment there, in passing, where we considered texting back and pretending to be “Georgia” but as a group we decided it was better to let sleeping dogs lie. Occasionally L—, sitting closest to the phone, would reach over to unlock it, scroll through it with some sort of mute fascination, and sigh to himself, and put it back.

It pinged again twice the next day of the dinner party — day three — with an “i’m sorry about that voicemail,” and “if you really want to bury me you should bring a shovel”. Yeesh. But hey. To a certain extent, I get it. Winter is hard. Becoming lost in the sauce of recollection and melancholy is a poor place to swim for months on end. Sometimes we reach our wits end and the only thing to do is to reach out even when we know we’re unwanted; sometimes we bury our phones because our exes keep texting us; sometimes we bury our heads in the sand, or blankets, or in one another, until a Springtime of the soul finally turns its green ecstatic face our way.

We forgot about the phone gradually, since outside the snow continued to pour down and the general vibes inside were beginning to grow more manic.

Winter is an essential mediation between the highs and lows of the social year but the season breaks, dutifully though harshly in terms of its long-drawn out pauses, the illusion that our social lives could ever be a constant flow and not the dynamic living things that they are.

Extensions of ourselves, our social lives grow and decay in accordance to natural cycles. This drives me, at least, to manic holding and non-relinquishing. If we are to survive winter every year, over and over again, we must learn to let go of everything and rely on what we need to return to, what we need to regrow with improved hardiness come Spring. What is an ellipses but a series of dots who’ve lost their attention and stand waiting in line, bored… There is going to be no end… no resolution to their plight… We have to leave them behind… their thoughts unfinished… It is their purpose, after all, to allude…

Winter is best when a candle flickers, when the candles sputters and coughs up. The winter is best when I can trade in my digital eyes for real ones. But eventually even the paper becomes oppressive. The winter is best when the other side of your pillow is cool enough to flip around and rest your head against, the feathers becoming warm against the grain of the hair on your head. The winter is best when you’re dressed the part: in a gigantic scarf. The winter is best when it is toiled around inside of (you: a motor’s piston back and forth; your home: a machine keeping active despite the desolation surrounding it) until the ravens gather outside the third-floor apartment directly across the street from yours, all of them (a concerning number of ravens — and you forgot how big the birds are) peeping in the window directly across the street to something you can’t quite see from your own window, something secret and out of sight. You wonder out loud did someone die? and you wait for an ambulance to prove your case, suddenly forced again to come to terms with your eventual mortality and that you’re betting on someone else having lapsed in theirs and expired from this world. Winter is best when you can sleep at night.

Statues darken under the weight of the snow. There’s no one to look to except yourself. And you’re so sick of seeing yourself in this light.

Heavy and white, the sun keeps me moving. My heart beats all winter and I can hear every beat because the doors in my ears have closed for the season. The heart is an audible puzzle box; speaking in binary, its beating soaks whatever ear is cupped to my chest: quick, what do you hear? ThudthudthudthudThisThursday. This thursday? What’s this thursday? That’s a question for you and not for me. What is this thursday? But alas! It’s already Friday! Too bad, loser. Thursday’s already passed us by. We let our leaves rustle for too long and now the trees are all bare and dead-looking. We let our thoughts wind themselves into the dirt like signposts declaring a thought died here. The snowflakes came down and stuck to the sidewalk, covered up everything like bedsheets over a scandal, building up into massive formations, wonders of the wintertime world, and the snowmen created begin to move on their own…

The dinner party continued into its second week. L— had to leave the dinner party, eventually. His manager had threatened him over text with a bad time, i.e. unemployment, after L— didn’t show up for his shift on Thursday, and he announced to all of us with a wave of his hands that he was leaving because he desperately needed this job but that he wouldn’t be gone forever so please don’t worry about him after he’s gone.

We tried to convince him to stay, the winter wasteland outside wasn’t looking great, for instance, but he wouldn’t stand for it. “Everyone leaves the dinner party at some point,” he reasoned. “I’ll be back. I really need to get paid.” We all agreed with this logic, getting paid was important, and so together we fashioned a rope made of kitchen towels so he could escape (the downstairs door was sealed tight by the snow) and a pair of snow shoes made of tennis rackets. He descended out the window onto the snow, which I might add was now a little over eight feet, or two and a half meters, with a crunch and we watched him trek away into the white yonder.

“Let us know how your first day was!” B— yelled his way. “Text us!”

L— turned to wave. He was bound head to toe in scarves and jackets so he didn’t even try to say anything but he did wave, gave us a thumbs up. A minute or two after he disappeared into the snowfall, we watched a massive creature made out of snow move slowly past the window, down Lincoln, wading through the snow as if it were high water. From the window we watched this (um) thing move past and after it was out of earshot we slammed the window shut, checking out the blinds to make sure its eyeless face hadn’t turned our way. Fully now out of food now and slightly panicked and biding our time in this apartment where we had been trapped for weeks by this point, hunger became a raw boredom. After he left, we never saw L— again. We eventually ate the dogs down in the doggy daycare.

I used to run every day. I’ve been flighty for years. Escaping made-up situations in my head in most cases is just a justification for running away as much as I do, but knowing that doesn’t stop me from finding some way to justify my escape. It might be confirmation bias to think I’m in the right, that I was “escaping” anything at all except for real human feelings and commitments (big and small)…

But at the end of the day, sometimes you need to confirmation bias. A dreary wintertime and a sense of solipsism is a disastrous combination. Let yourself be drawn away to far horizons when you need to be. Let yourself be reminded there are stars in the sky. There’s no reason not to let your daydream sing quietly to you from the insides of your own head but don’t think for one second that that makes you unique or that the daydreams of others won’t ever harmonize with your own.

Spring arrived quietly, eventually, and all at once. I had been idling by the window with my head in my arms leaned up against the window frame when it happened. This was the third month of the same dinner party. I don’t have words for the things I had seen outside in the haze of winter over the course of those three months, the homeric battles between men riding dogsleds, great duels between jacketed men wielding golf clubs, the annihilation of a cybertruck underneath the massive flat foot of a snow golem. The list goes on. I remember B— had eagerly taken pictures of the many wintertime monstrosities that passed the windows, rediscovering the idea of producing a bestselling coffee table book, but after the fact no publisher would publish the photos, accusing her of generating the photos of Midjourney.

Meanwhile, C— had gone fully and properly wine mad by this point, a couple months into the dinner party, his latent genetic alcoholism causing him to clear out the pantries and try eventually to invade the neighboring apartments in the building who happened to have prepared for just this exact situation, having barred their door with wood nailed into the floor. After C— knocked, a small note slid out from under the door saying “no wine for u.” And once C— began to pound on the apartment’s door with his shoulder and knee, we would hear a cackling from inside and a “good try, boyo! this white’s allll mineeeee,” which would only enrage C— all more and he would return red and puffy-faced to the apartment where I— and I would talk him down from punching a hole in the drywall.

The shock of it the winter had lost its flavor by this point. It became mundane. Slow. Plodding. The whole winter being what it was, it became drab. We were still here, all in the same three bedrooms, living room, and kitchen, but we were only quietly here now. We were not wine drunk. We were not ecstatic. We were not well fed. We were not happy anymore by each others’ company, we were only occupying it. We were growing old. I had felt my the block between my eyes and my head begin to regrow.

Sunrise was approaching, though. A new day broached the horizon as I leaned into the window’s sill. Well here it was. Spring was coming, alright. The snow down the street was beginning to sag and to melt. I sat up in the window. I watched a snow person throw up its snow arms in defeat to the rising sun, beginning to melt its body into the Earth and the greedy mouths of the Honey Locusts up and down the avenue.

Over the East hill, the direction from which the mass melting came, I heard a familiar sound; a distant screaming, growing out of the warmth. Here he was again, the same old man in a red tracksuit and goggles who had nearly plowed over me in cross-country skis just months before, now jogging slowly but steadily the opposite way, from the East instead of from the West. Instead of wearing the ski-suit he now wore a bright red Adidas tracksuit, yelled in a single screeching note like he was a megaphone and he held his arms up while running, pulling the grey winter along with him, the winter peeling off of everything like a sticker to reveal, underneath it all, a blue and green world.

Inspired by the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and the Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington. I write this in early March… but I write for you, in June. Here’s hoping this piece, now written, can become a length of twine to haul my small wooden vessel back to summertime through the thick fog of a back-and-forth, truly undressable springtime.

next week: