Kindling
It was the winter of fires that would not take; of ash everywhere; never enough heat. The winter of ice: opaque waves creeping closer over the roads at night, shutting you off from time and the outside. Everything stopped. Your watch, your heater. You piled all you could on your bed but still the cold woke you at least twice an hour. You dozed all morning. Afternoons you prepared for evening, spent all your daylight kindling, willing the flames to live; lost hours crouched in the hearth, giving mouth to mouth to the sputtering coal, praying for breath. You knew you were just treating symptoms. The problem lay farther than you could reach, no matter how you contorted yourself. The chimney was stuffed with the stubs of years condensed into soft black snow that swallowed your stretching arms when you went to clear it. It needed more than you had; somebody trained in removing the past. But this was the winter you forgot how to use the phone; forgot how to write a letter, construct a sentence. You failed in the cold alone, speechless, convinced it was something you’d done or not done. By dark the room would be fully ablaze, lit by laughing flames, denying there’d ever been a struggle. Meanwhile months passed, scrunched up like scrap on the grate, and all that dead weight you ignored built up like the frost as it kept getting colder.