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┌─╷─┐ ╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub ╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes └─╵─┘
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There's something patiently, quietly exciting about the cold winter, city air on the cheeks, just after dusk, with lights still shining around and people still mulling about. A briskness, a quickening of some heart's hope, with and by and in spite of the dying of the year.
Memory's part of it, too. The concept of "Winter" has always been one of my favorite weather-times-placetypes, with stories to match. It's that crescendo in the bridge of a song that changes key—and unlocks something in your feelings to make the next part more intense. Clove cigarette breaks in the snow on the library patio during exam cram time. Driving with the top down to a new boyfriend's flat in the coast city after goth night clubbing. Traveling to and exploring new cities for adventure and intrigue with new, mysterious friends. Glory to the eternal moment, indeed.
The cold dark of winter is not death, not here. It is the crystallization of what was into patterns made clear, into forms made new, into spires of hopeful resolution and determined beauty. The sharp, crammed, harsh clarity of city winters is a refining of what was into a crisp will-be. Seas of lights dotting a city, rivers of bright whites and reds of traffic lights and car headlamps are the same as the blood of hibernating animals or the sap of leaf-barren trees. It's proof of life in the dark, cold night; it's the revelation of what really lies beneath it all. Surviving the cold, long dark necessitates a violent, bright heat of life. If a single star is a celebration of light in darkness and heat in a cold vacuum, a city in winter is a whole galaxy of life resolving to live, riotously and joyfully contradicting a world that says "no".
And yet, what do you hear? The low whirr of traffic. An occasional beep, a sometimes siren. Footsteps. A breeze down an arcade half-lit from streetlamps. Conversations passing by stoops as ever. All of it slightly more crisp, slightly more clear in the cold air in the dark after dusk.
The city doesn't need to prove its own heat or life—it just is.