It's Dark

It's getting pretty dark and dreary in the day most days now, and I don't know what it is about that that makes me feel so content, but I'm here looking at the white/grey sky and the still, bare tree branches, and I feel this deep sense of contentedness. It's my natural place, a little gloom. But a bright gloom. The sunlight and the darkness together.

It was cold enough, earlier, to want to cover my bare hands in my room. I'm typing and feel the chill like a frost laid blanket-like across my skin. It's a weird feeling, noticing that you just slightly want to put your gloves on indoors. And it's not super comfortable and means it's time to put the heating on, but I always find a strange sort of comfort in that tentative cold. The little tiptoes of cold creeping over me. It makes me feel really grateful for the ability to warm myself up, for a start. I know a lot of people have poor heating and/or insulation and it's really hard to be in a place like that throughout the winter. But I guess it's like waking up and splashing your face with cold water and feeling super awake and refreshed. It does something that makes me feel bizarrely good. And this whole season is like that, psychologically, for me. It's so weird, but so great.

I've got my big winter coat fully out. It'll be permanently attached to me for months. I'll start getting sick of it in January, most likely. The cycle of the winter coat continues. But right now I'm in that beautiful honeymoon stage where I'm excited to be a bulky coat lady stepping too enthusiastically on the leaves that are still congregating in crunchy piles everywhere. I'm excited to wrap the huge scarf I got last year around me like I'm basically just wearing a blanket in public, because it's so big and warm. I'm alive. It's dark. It's cold. It's time for more hot chocolate (I had some the other day and it was so good, and I went to sleep early - very beautiful).