White noise is all around inside. Steam comes alive in your apartment. You like to imagine the steam as invisible dancing cicadas. The radiators invasiveness is similar and impossible to get away from. The temperature is 25 degrees outside and feels colder, the Internet says, but you stay behind fogged windows. You stay safe.
The weekend snow is the first real fall of the winter, but you haven’t been outside now that your mind has adjusted to thinking that low 20s is the bone cold of what the negative temperatures use to be. Maybe we haven’t imagined the present enough to realize that the past doesn’t come back every year anymore. Things really do disappear, and mostly, we’ve earned that hurt. There must be some architect dreaming of building this city on a bridge, another architect dreaming of building another city underground for the sea level that is rising and the fault line that has been quiet past its expiration in a constant threat to shatter the lives that live along it. All the while, another architect that acts just as it was thirty years ago. Climate change science. Post-truth. Warnings. Nobody ever really listens, do they? You were doing errands when the rain came to darken the shadows in your living room. The apartment becomes quiet, the heat simmering down, so you put the kettle and radio on. Dance around in only your sweater and wet hair. You wonder when winter will not be worth the complaint. You think of your parents and wonder who might have helped them shovel out of their drive, knowing it certainly wasn’t you. And hasn’t been, for years on end.
Papermaw 