My bed is so cold without you in it. I lay there until the sun reaches its zenith before I manage to coax myself out from between the warm blankets. I turn the heater on as high as it will go while I brew a pot of coffee, pour it into a mug, and set the mug outside. I can’t tolerate hot coffee; even when it’s below freezing, I will always drink it iced.
While I wait for my coffee to cool, I curl up over the floor heater with a blanket over my head. The hot air causes the blanket to billow up like a balloon, but I keep it pinned to the floor with my knees. My back aches, but it is blissfully warm in my blanket cave. This was easier when I was a little girl, but I do what I can to keep this house pleasant while you’re away.
Our house is so big—too big—for its negligible number of occupants. Even when you’re here, it’s drafty and full of rooms that we never use. Often, I wonder why you bought it. But despite its freezing floorboards and barely functioning water heater, it is beautiful. Gables and stained-glass windows adorn the house, jutting out at strange, unsymmetrical angles that are as confusing as they are charming. Rooms have secret pockets that haven’t been explored in centuries. The paint has long since worn off, leaving exposed wood that creaks whenever I walk up the stairs. It makes the Victorian feel more rustic and cabin-like. It suits the house more this way, I think; a cabin belongs in the woods.
The mountains that form the valley curve around our house like the rib cage of a giant. Their sunlight-dappled bluffs are interrupted periodically by clouds passing in front of the sun. Every autumn, we watch the aspens burn gold. They survive as skeletons in the winter. Frosted with snow, they look like glass, strong yet brittle. Some days, I feel that if I fall, I too will shatter, snapping and cracking like the trees that burst from the cold.
I stand up, pulling my heated blanket around me like a cloak, and retrieve my mug from outside. The coffee smells like winter.
I try not to watch the calendar as I wait for the equinox. Maybe if I act like I don’t care, the days will progress faster, and the calendar will get shorter. It never works. I know you don’t mean to hurt me with your absence, but sometimes the unintentional knife twists hurt more.
They plowed the roads today, and with the sun shining, I have a hankering to pretend that it’s spring—yet another strategy I employ to make time fit my needs. I rummaged in the shed and pulled out my bike, unused since the first snow. Biking to work is one of my greatest joys. The road to our house is small, only wide enough for one car, and is used only by ourselves and the mailman. Over time, the trees lining the pavement laced their branches together, creating an interlocking canopy that feels like it’s curving around me, protecting me.
The day is short, though the days are lengthening, and the nights are shrinking. The rabbits have started to shed their winter coats. But there is still ice on the ground, still frost marks on the windows. I’m still in the grips of winter, and you’re still gone.
I shiver when I step outside at the end of the day. I have gloves, but they’re not warm enough for the wind that blows against me while I ride; I will arrive home with my hands so cold that it feels like my fingernails might pop off. The sun is setting, turning the snow-covered mountains pink, and god rays turn the sublime landscape divine. Snow crunches underfoot as I unlock my bike and wheel it onto the bike path, taking care not to step on black ice. The air is markedly cooler without the sun’s warm gaze, and whatever it had melted earlier has already frozen back over.
It’s dark when I get home. I’m pedaling slowly over the snow when my wheels slip on ice. They slide out from under me before I know what’s happening. My hip hits the ground first. I’m lucky I didn’t land on bone, because surely that would be broken, but I am certain that it will be bruised for the next few weeks. I lay on the cold ground for a minute, waiting for my heart to climb out of my mount and into my chest where it belongs.
“Orithyia?” you call out.
I’m too shocked by your voice to answer.
“Was that you? Are you alright?”
I wheel my bike into the shed, limping with each step. The wheel squeaks with every revolution. I’ve dented it in the fall.
You’re waiting for me on the porch when I return to our house.
“Hiemal,” I say, “you’re home early.”
You smile. “Today’s the equinox.”
“Is it already?”
“You marked the calendar. It’s circled four times in red pen.”
I hum, but I don’t acknowledge my actions. It’s part of the game, part of pretending I didn’t notice how long you were gone for, part of pretending that now I won’t be counting the days that we have left together until you must leave again.
“Come inside,” you say, holding the door open. “I made apple cider.”
There’s a class of lonely that’s present, and there’s a class of lonely that’s retrospective. I can’t engage with the present—it has far too much power when it subsumes my life—but with you here, with your hand around my waist and your cinnamon-spice breath on my neck, I can give myself space to reflect.
“Are you okay?” you ask.
“Yes.”
This is also part of the game: pretending that your absences don’t bother me, that you can just walk back into my life and slot in seamlessly, that I don’t need to relearn intimacy. When your hand brushes against mine, I have to restrain a gasp. It’s been a long three months. I don’t remember your hands feeling this way.
You smell the same. Always, you smell like the wind, like fresh cut wood. I want to bury my face in the juncture between your neck and your shoulder. I want to die there, with my arms wrapped around your waist, frozen like two trees entwined together in an embrace that will last centuries. But you’re dynamic when you’re back, enthused by the return of your physical body. You want to feel again, to enjoy the senses that you don’t have access to when you are the snow, the frost, and the dark. I know that you can see me when you’re away, that you always send a gust of wind to ruffle my hair or a shower of snow to dust my eyelashes, but it’s not the same for either of us: I can’t love you as a season like I love you as a person, and you can only love me as the dead loves the cold.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
I allow my eyes to focus on your face instead of the cracked ceiling of the bedroom. Your kisses linger on my lips. “Yes.”
“Because you don’t seem okay.”
You’ve been gone for three months. The last thing that I want to do is to push you away. But it’s so hard to fall into our routine when for so long, I’ve been following my routine without you.
Your touch is always unfamiliar when you return.
“You know it’s okay if you don’t want to,” you say.
“I know.”
You don’t move. You’ve never made me feel obligated to oblige you, but the ingrained guilt lingers. Sometimes I think that it’s worse that you don’t pressure me—it’s what I expect. It’s what I’m used to. But it’s not who you are.
I roll over so that you can’t see how my eyes water. You wrap your arms around me, pulling me close. Your skin is always so cold. I pull you closer.
The bed feels so massive when you’re gone. I usually curl up on my side, taking up the smallest possible space and using the largest possible blanket. Everything is different when you’re here; you fill up the remaining space like gas in a beaker. When you’re gone, you are omnipresent and immaterial. When you’re home, your smell lingers in every room. I can hear you wandering around rooms that I’ve closed and locked and never looked through. You wake up early and make me coffee in the morning and you are already sound asleep by the time I make my way up to our bedroom. Your laughter startles the silence away from where it hides in my heart.
The weather warms as I warm to your presence. I remember your touch, and then I start to crave it. I stop wandering the hallways like a half-forgotten ghost and plant tulips. We eat watermelon and carve pumpkins in the fall. My lingering heartbreak is almost healed, and I am almost restored to the person that I was. Maybe you’re not the one who changes during your absences. Maybe it’s me.
My heart rate spikes when I see the first yellow leaf and when my breaths come out in mist, but we don’t speak about it. Time is irrelevant to us. I will make it irrelevant. We drink hot chocolate and make apple pie. I hold your hand whenever they’re empty, and you map my face in kisses. We rake leaves into piles and dive into them like I did when I was a child. I clutch your arm as we wander through the endless corners of a corn maze. On the first day of snow, we throw loose powder at each other, giggling and shrieking when the cold water melts under our clothes.
And then I wake up. And your side of the bed is empty. The house is once again hauntingly large.
I close my eyes and force myself not to think. There’s a fresh brewed pot of coffee in the kitchen and a note on the counter. I put the note in a drawer—unread—and take out a red pen. Today is the solstice. Three months until the equinox. The game begins again.
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Olive Ann is a Creative Writing M.A. student at Queens University Belfast and is a Contributing Editor at Arboreal Literary Magazine. Her hobbies include writing in third person and breaking the fourth wall.
© 2023, Olive Ann Tucker
Halfway Down the Stairs 