Last Soul's Confession

My winter is improbable. I think I bring it with me. Not long ago, for a month, maybe more, maybe slightly less, I had one of those blasts of summer. Hot sun of passion and inspiration beating down on me, and I revelled in it. But now, today, building slowly over past days and weeks, the greyness of winter is returning.

Like the leaden sky I emerged into this afternoon. This morning had been sunshine, not hot, not even warm. The air already had begun to turn to ice, was beginning to turn last night when, at 2 a.m., I made my final confession. But it had been sunny this morning.

The leaden sky this afternoon, and the hint of rain, though. I bring this winter with me into the world, it seems. I tear up the sun-filled postcards of other people and scatter them.

Winter is my habitat, and each year the ice age crawls a little closer. The cold snap lasts a little longer. The rarity of summer becomes all the more jealously desired. And wasted when it comes, most often.

Not this time, though. This summer’s blast has been the hottest on record and its heat warmed my bones through, making me wish I could revel in it forever.

The sun, the moon, the clear night sky. Daylight bright and lucid, and everything illuminated. Everything lit up from the sun that shone within me. Its source a novelty, I burnt too bright, too close beside it, and I burned it all away. The relentless heat of passion. The boy’s basic tool, armed with magnifying glass, to wreak destruction on a tiny world not built to withstand such ferocity, such focus.

My winter is improbable, unreal. There is no bookending of autumn or spring. Just two extremes. Relentless finite heat, and cold that stretches on until all parts of life are numb with it, all friendships broken by its ice, all loves lost and never to be reclaimed. The landscape is littered with the shards.

This day that started bright, that looked like being summer’s continuation, my final confession delivered, my soul unburdened into someone’s patient ear, now falls away in grey. And, strange child that I am, it comforts me.

I called Icarus to me, with the brightness of my summer sun. But Icarus this time has learned. Don’t fly into the sun. Don’t risk that fall to earth. Don’t kiss those rosy lips of summer and expect they will be sweet. Stay home, stay safe, the dangers are fewer that way.

It’s raining again in Manchester, like winter never left. The summer heat is gone again. The summer child is locked away. I huddle into my coat and feel the wind whip my hair into knots, and strands escape to fly across my face, into my eyes. My eyes reflect the colour of the sky, become their own official colour recorded on government forms. Grey. Blue, green, grey and gone, the song goes. Grey today. Gone soon enough. The silence of their glance, not caught by anyone. Their message left unopened, unacknowledged, undisturbed.

It’s raining, and the water drips from viaduct’s edge as I dodge traffic to cross from one corner of a junction to the other. The wind blows, and my umbrella stays inside my bag, useless, no defence, pure encumbrance. Did I bring this winter down, did I colour in the sky? Or did I want to hold onto summer too much, and winter heard the rumour?

No arguing that this summer did me good. I have flourished like the rarest flower nurtured under glass. No arguing that you can’t expect such summers to last forever, such blooms not to die away. I would hold onto it for longer, though. Given the choice. I would.

Winter is my habitat. But winter is too cold. And all along, I knew that this would happen.

My last soul’s confession given. My summer laid to rest.

© J R Hargreaves 2006