Hiver en ma coeur

"It must be winter in my heart" ---- The Avett Brothers

The title of this post is lifted from the title of a song by the Avett Brothers, and it is with apologies that I steal.

I know that the beginning of winter was just a couple of days ago, and I suppose this post is a day or two late, but that what happens when you are as cripplingly lazy as I am. However, the date on the calendar need not overly concern us because, as the song says it must be winter in my heart. It must be because I have to make it so. Just like number One 'makes it so' on the command of Captain Picard, I have given the executive order to make it winter in my heart. That order will not be as simple as the 'making it so' seems to indicate, and it has taken quite a bit of moral fortitude to give that command. I am not overly endowed with moral fortitude, and I have had to sit myself down, and give myself several stern 'talkings to' in order to be able to with any sense of purpose give the order that will bring winter down upon my heart. 

It must needs doing because of you my dear child of summer. You were born in the hottest month of the year, and winter is your deadly enemy. Well, get prepared to face your worst enemy, because winter has arrived in my heart. The frigid air will greet you upon your arrival, like an evil Wal-Mart greeter, the air is not here to make you comfortable it is here to freeze you out. Out of my heart, out of my system, and finally out of my life. There is no room for a child of summer in the winter of my heart. It has been created specifically to rid itself of the poison that is you. The starkness of the deadliest winter your limited imagination can conjure up is what you are face my child of summer. You are not prepared for this, this is the last winter of my discontent. No bright summer sun of York will arrive like the 7th Calvary to save you from the massacre of the winter.

The leaves of spring have fallen, and all you will see as you peer myopically around the winter of my heart are the branches of trees that have packed it in for winter. The dead branches are a symbol, a symbol that you, in your vanity and your ignorance will not understand. They are just the precursor, the first sign that you have wandered into a landscape that is not your friend. A landscape created, and being created by my force of will. A will that I had to summon to expel you from the (no longer existing) warmth of my hearth. To be honest, something I am certain you've forgotten how to be, the warmth of my heart was never, even on its best (hottest) day, too warm. It could sustain, barely, a person who wasn't afraid of a touch of coolness in the air. You, as a child of summer, can not handle coolness, and you should shudder at the thought of the coldness of the winter that is fast approaching.

It must be winter in my heart, all warm things must go the way of Dodo bird, they have to become extinct. The carnivals of spring and the festivals of summer have to be eradicated, removed from the equation that contains you.  If you pay attention, which you so rarely do, you will notice the cemetery off to the side. The graveyard that contains your predecessors the people that trod this cold path before you. You will notice, I hope, as you walk this icy path that in that cemetery are many stones, if you are adventurous enough to pause before them you will see a name, or maybe two that you recognize. If you study the dates you will also detect a pattern. The starting dates are as varied as the spice choices in a Turkish market, but several of the end dates are very similar. The years are different of course, but the month and day are very close in time. Several of them have this time of year engraved on their stone.

And if you are willing to stand there in the graveyard of relationships a little longer, you will see a stone with a very familiar name engraved upon it. You will also notice a dark figure coldly chiseling today's date in the stone. That is me, this is winter both by the calendar, and in my heart, and I am engaging in a very time honoured tradition. You see, I do not 'do' Christmas, I ruin Christmas. It is what I do, what I am doing, and probably what I will continue to do long after you, child of summer, have succumbed to the long, cold winter that is now in my heart. You will succumb you know, just as the flowers that are all red, pink, and blue wither and die as the first touch of frost lights upon their delicate petals. You too will wither, shrivel, and fade back into the ground from which you sprung. Winter is the time of empty flower beds, stark naked tree branches, and pure untrammeled snow. In that crisp, clear, frigid air, you will notice that the stars look as if a madman threw them up into the sky in some incoherent pattern, a pattern that a madman such as Van Gogh would struggle to make sense of, but I realize the pattern, after all I made the pattern, I made the path upon which you tread, I made the gravestones which you read, and I made the winter in my heart. I wish you luck.