Ice whine

Try to picture a crippled man wearing a hospital gown, poised between two parallel bars, struggling to get to his feet. His hands grip the bars with all his might, and his arms are shaking like trees in a hurricane. His determined face is wincing from the strain of his whole body weight. He is sweating, not from heat or fatigue, but desperation and fear. Every muscle in his torso is burning, but his legs dangle weakly. He is learning to walk again.

What's strange is that at night, in his dreams, he can walk and run. His feet move beneath him without a trace of effort and concentration. As though his subconscious mind doesn't know about the accident that paralysed him; about the fall that brought him frozen legs.

Each day nurses at the hospital coax his legs through tedious physiotherapy. Some days his progress is remarkable: for a few moments he can stand. Sometimes he can walk a short distance. But on most other days he must sit; and curse the feeble rate of his progress, and wonder when he will walk again.

Frankly speaking: this is how I've always felt about Toronto weather. The God damn icy winds, evenings that start at 4 pm, the coal-coloured snow caking the edges of streets, numb fingers and rivers of runny noses, and awkward trudging over unshovelled walks, and the heart-pounding realization that your car tires have forgotten the surface of the road, and the fact that everything takes longer in the winter, everyone is dumber in the winter, every God damn thing is one thousand times more difficult in the winter, and yes, it's much harder to stay warmer than get cooler you clods, and no, I don't think gentle snowfall in the evening is pretty, but a harbinger of a fucking season of death; a piercing, slow death, where the empty branches of trees reach up to the sky like skeleton hands, beginning for euthanasia, or a scarf, or chapstick -- in such conditions I can barely stand on my own two feet.

And summer, like the dream of being able to walk again, seems hopelessly distant. Perhaps I am being a bit overdramatic, but still. Winter blows.