november

It's cold here, I reply to my grandparents when they ask how our week's going. It's cold, and wet, and already I am helping my friends put up Christmas decorations and string LEDs across their rooms, playing holiday music to try and forget about outside, where the mist settles into your bones and everything is gray. Everything is gray. The clouds are gray, the sky is gray, the sticks of the trees are gray, even the wind is gray as it whips past and makes the branches shake. We are the only color in this land of gray, Impressionistic dots of pink and green in our puffy winter coats and hats and our umbrellas and our certainties. We shoulder past each other in the hallways on our way out the double doors, nose turned up at the cold, zippers undone like Vermonters, which we are. I wear your hoodie and think endlessly of your smile and the warmth of your arms. It begins to rain, again, smearing our reflections like watercolors in the bus windows. Do you ever wonder if the person in the puddle is real, and you're just a reflection of him? Hobbes asks Calvin, and I think it over as I walk home on road glistening like glass. The houses are gray and the little birds that scurry into their gutters are the color of paintbrushes. If I am, in fact, a reflection, I wonder how big that puddle is. Miles? Meters? Years? When you die, maybe the person got tired of staring at themselves, or you, or someone's called them away. Dinnertime! Maybe our lifetimes are mere seconds to the people inhabiting the puddles. Maybe they think the same things about us, and stand at the edge of the water for hours to see what happens when we leave the frame.

Anyways, it's November and I'm home now, sitting in my room writing in my calendar with a black Sharpie, circling Thanksgiving over and over until the days beside it have nearly disappeared. The picture is a landscape of gray sticks, but it's pitch black outside and I can hear cars speeding through the water on the streets. Somewhere, I imagine, turkeys mill around in a field wet with rain. Their owner watches through a blurry window or maybe from the enclave of a shed, cap pulled low. The turkeys toss their heads vainly, North American peacocks who stand like they're posing for an invisible camera, look at me, look at me, red and black and mottled brown, picture-perfect models. They have nineteen days to live.