Write a letter that starts, "Dear Weather, How can you be?" I don't know where my gloves are, I mean I think I know where they are but I keep forgetting to look there, so I may as well not know. My hands are useless in the cold. They've always been spindly, but they've gotten even spindlier. My fingers are just bones wrapped in skin, maybe a bit of whatever that fluid is that goes into the eye masks that you chill in the refrigerator. My hands have got that fluid in place of blood, they go so cold so fast, and then stay there. I walk around a lot with my hands in my pockets and think, "What if I fall over, what if I trip and can't get my hands out of my pockets quickly enough to break my fall, what if I fall right onto my face in the street?" It's not likely, but still. It doesn't stop me from running very carefully up and down stairs, hands in pockets. It's just something to worry about.

After a thousand years I'm at the end of that book. It's a terrible book, but every hundred pages or so it says something perfect. Last night on the subway I was so tired and anxious about work and being on the start of my first winter cold, and wedged into a doorway listening to too sad music and some teenage shouting at the other end of the car, and then I got to the part where James dies, and I should have seen it coming but I didn't, somehow. I got teary and sniffly and embarrassed over a terrible book. A man with a mustache I couldn't understand was looking at me and I felt dumb, and I don't know. I'll finish it on the way home tonight, and it will be worse. I'm much more tired and worried today. Tomorrow I'll start a new book and it will decide who I am for the next month.

I mean, I'm worried and exhausted and too cold all of the time, but it's kind of wonderful.