Perpetual Winter.

I live in a town of perpetual winter.

Snow is ever falling and fallen on the frozen ground. There is no end to the deluge of disastrous cold.

Trees are mere skeletons of themselves, showing their secret limbs and their inner humility to the outside world. Any leaves that have managed to stay in place are brown paper replicas of their springtime splendor, their veins are brittle and unyielding to the wind that shakes them like old, dry rattles on their creaking branches.

Water is solid and unmoving. It's ebb and flow has turned to a stoic statement against renewal, movement, change. Icicles hang off of every peak and point and grow with every drop of melting snow that tries to escape its solid state of affairs.

There is no difference in colour or brightness between the sky and the snow. If not for the separation of a thin, black line of horizon drawn across the two, it would be as if the snow were piled up to heaven, and the adventurous might climb there with snowshoes and sled dogs.

Every so often, a flock of wayward birds cut their images with razor-tipped wings across the stark vastness of the cloudless sky. They walk along the river like a freshly a paved street, leaving their tracks in the snow as if to sign their names, or their lover's with a heart around it.

Whatever grass has been released from its white encasement has lost it's green and lies limp and listless on the ground, beaten and wounded by the fists of winter.

Things here are not what they seem.

Springtime does not mean flowers, or showers, it means flurries and wind chill factors, mittens and fireplaces. Sunshine doesn't mean warmth, it means blinding cold light that squints the eyes and makes coloured kaleidoscopes with every blink.

There is no distinction between black pavement and black ice. Like the sky and snow. They coat the streets and crack the ground, turning roads into obstacle courses and ice rinks.

Perpetual winter is just that. Perpetual. Forever. No end in sight. No reprieve. No respite. No change of scenery.

Things just stay the same.

Things do not move.

Things do not reproduce.

Things do not grow.

Freshness stales, freezes and dies. Moisture cracks, seizes and dries.
Hair stands on end. Fingertips numb and become cumbersome appendages, useless and heavy.
Noses run and turn red. Ears burn without being spoke of from the wind that blows inside their winding tunnels and makes the head feel hollow with cold.

That same wind cuts through brick and wood and metal and rustles through my pages, sounding like falling water...or rather the memory of falling water since even water cannot fall in perpetual winter, only harden and turn to glass.

I keep telling myself that nothing can last forever.

But winter keeps proving me wrong.