I find it somehow ironic that we met in the winding-down of fall. Days getting shorter and leaves gasping their last photosynthetic breaths, the precursor to winter and to us. Slowly the cold overtook us.
Everything was so beautiful in the beginning. Every day was coffee, conversation, and cigarettes. Lying face to face listening to your favorite record in its entirety just to build up the courage to spill our guts to each other.
But it just kept getting colder.
My black, woolen pea-coat was a staple of those days. I found it on sale last year. A tremendous deal. Perfect construction. A veritable blanket against the harsh winter.
But you never seemed to get as cold as I did. You never seemed to feel it. I found that hard to believe. At times I found you hard to believe, as I should have.
Thirty degrees outside, you need your jacket. You'll freeze to death. When you first put it on after feeling the frost-bitten fingers of winter inching up your neck, caressing not-so-softly your ears and nose, how wonderful is that coat?
But it is not temporary. It is not something affixed to your skin or even to your first layer of clothing. No matter the material, the cost, the time, the care, or the labor put forth in the construction, that coat will not last. It may make it through two, maybe even three winters, but eventually holes will form (which I mean, you can cover with patches but then other holes will show up and you'll need more patches and then one of the patches might fall off and you'll need another patch or a hole might even show up in one of those oh-so-sturdy patches that you spent an entire five dollars on and then you've got a patch covering up a patch and eventually the jacket isn't a jacket anymore) or you'll lose it in some tragic, larger than life accident and you will need another coat because winter is a sure thing.
But October was still warm and so were we. An unnaturally warm October if I remember correctly. Late nights spent on my porch plotting out our course for the future. Summer in a far away country, unrestricted by the troubles of home. Weekends spent lazily laying out our lives to each other. Recounting memories explained in detail for the sake of understanding each other just a little better.
November and December were different. As the cold came, I seemed to need my coat more than you needed me. I felt less in your embrace than I did in the covering of my arms from its sleeves. Sure there were those fleeting moments. But how did they compare to the countless nights I spent driving to whatever party you were frequenting to resolve an argument only to find you drunk and passed out?
Or New Years.
It was frigid. And I had left my coat at home. We hadn't been speaking. You were God-knows-where and I was alone at a party. The question on every lip was where is she? Is everything OK? I didn't know. I couldn't. Where had I left my jacket? Where were you? It all culminated with frantic phone calls placed from the inside of my car in the driveway of my home. Words shoved in between panicked breaths begging for two minutes with you only to be ignored.
The difficulty with outerwear is that if you take it off, and sometimes you have to, is that winter is still there. It twists up your spine and leaves you shaking.
You were an overcoat. Stitched together to hold off the cold, but you didn't make it through the winter.
