winter memories
Maybe because I’ve wriiten so much about summer or maybe it just stems from trying to conjur up a few things to love about New York winters, which I always find a bit difficult and trying. I started thinking back to my first winter here and by association, my first holiday season, not so much nostalgically but a feeling akin to leafing through an old journal and being transported back in time to a person you no longer are, with beliefs you no longer hold. The memories are like a dream both vivid and skewed. The colors still bright but some of the faces are missing. There are, slightly obscured from view, peripheal things dancing on the outer edges. Feelings that are, while maybe important then, lost in the shuffle of growing up. While maybe you recall feeling a certain way, it conjures no particular emotion other than the pleasure or pain caused from remembering a time not so long ago, when you were younger.
The first thing that my mind called to the forefront was the ice rink in Central Park. I can’t remember the ride to the park or renting the skates. Only that we were standing in the center of the rink, Brian and I, and it was just before Christmas. Maybe it was snowing. Maybe tiny snowflakes were drifting around us (it snowed more in New York not-so-long-ago). And he had, in his hands a small crudely wrapped, duct taped and glued package.
We had broken up a little over a month beforehand and were both dating other people, which we talked fairly openly about, but I’d gotten him a gift anyway. I remember he smiled so hard I thought the edges of his cheeks would grow extra dimples and crevices in them. I remember that he looked at me in a way I can only recall having seen once or twice since, like someone falling in love and he kissed me hard before opening it. What I can’t recall is how I felt exactly at that moment: excited about the watch which had cost me eighty dollars, a severe price on a student budget and excited about the moment which felt at the time so perfectly story book that we were both swept away in it. I skated small circles around him, helping him pull away the tape, nearly half a ridiculous roll, both of us giggling. We pulled and pulled and laughed, and maybe there was snow in our hair, maybe not, till finally he had to cut the box with a pocket knife I’d smuggled onto the ice. He pulled the watch out and turned it over in his hands, both of us still half laughing. And we kissed and our friends gave a small clap and it was one of those moments.
Times like these are as cherished as your first adolescent love letters. Tucked in a keepsake box.
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