Revision: Ice & Society
As the weather dips lower and lower, and the sky falls closer and closer, the brightness of night reflects off the sparkles of frozen liquid. Snow, flakes and stars in one, pile and drift against my legs as I stride through the alley. The houses sit like jack o’ lanterns, with gaping mouths and wide eyed windows. Their gold shining across the backyard canvases of powder. Unassuming in their individual existence, but as a concept, owning a home is daunting for some of us, if not most of us. The houseless epidemic is a global crisis, unifying us across borders in our inability to provide basic human rights for our own kind. Relentless thoughts of guilty empathy, every time I see someone homeless.
Kicking tufts of snowdrifts, the sense of injustice rises in my throat. What is it about this cold that feels like I remember it in my bones? Is this aching just another form of muscle memory, to the days when we were all just molecules of ice trapped and frozen in time, only to be released into the future? How long does it take a person to thaw when the winter finally fades into a respite of freezer burnt leftovers? Molecules reeassembled as humans, a more confusing state of existence than mere H2O. How dare we leave each other out to freeze in sub zero temperatures, the refrigeration unit that is the outdoors being large enough for countless bodies.
The alleyway stretches out before me, like a white carpet leading to the heart of the concrete jungle just a neighborhood or two away. Looking outside, the hush that falls over the city is palpable, I can hold it in my hands like a broken dove. Albino and red eyed, tired and alive, the dove takes flight without my help. Silently lifting into the night sky, matching its speed with the comets. Do the homeless count shooting stars too? When a person fights the cold that burns through their bones as they struggle to sleep, the urge to surrender to the ground and its frigid fearless fingers must be hard to resist. We are fortunate to not have human popsicles lining the sidewalks when the shelters are too full to take more refugees from the encroaching and consuming ice.
What is it about the opposite of frozen that matters to us? Everything and nothing all at once. One might live somewhere warm and dry, never bothering to consider that ice waits in our veins, lingering to be frozen. The harshness of reality is the massive number of people who do not have the ability to stay warm. Drive downtown in nearly any large city in UnAmerica and the vast population of houseless folks is crushing. Sleeping in this sort of icy weather is a gamble, with life as the chips thrown at the dealer.
Molecularly speaking - we are water, and when the globe passes into another Ice Age, as it has done several times before, we will become one with the Ice once again. Melding as we freeze, held in position like the telephone poles that lean into our communications.
And ice comes whether we want it to or not. I stood on the porch and cursed the cold weather, and it didn’t stop. I have shaken my fist, stomped my feet - and the ground still froze. Is it best that we concede this sort of battle? When the loss is a guarantee, and the sword of equality falls short of its intended throats, what can be done to wake the conscience of the greedy? How does a person sleep outdoors in a bed made with sheets of ice and not become one with it; sleeping forever in a frosted grave.
The barren horizon of winter weather, in cities or the wilderness, is as vicious as it is unavoidable. What sort of questions are asked internally, when watching broken souls trundle rusted shopping carts full of stiffly frozen blankets, shooting up on the sidewalk in an effort to numb the cold that numbs their bones. What questions, if any, are asked? What if I wandered down this alley all the way to the center of the city, the shame of the sick and addicted on display at intersections lit green with the glow of traffic lights? Could I help any of them, or would I just be putting myself in a dangerous position?
Do we ice our hearts in reaction to this depravity, this heart ache, this shameful behaviour of a country leaving its own people out in the cold to die. Do you see these people still? Have your eyes and mind found a way to blur them from your vision, censored by your own humanitarian grief? The only way to keep the ice at bay is to melt it, or ignore it.
Seasons of lost souls mumbling their salutations through addiction muddled lenses. Seasons of ice, making gentle sounds in the still air, splitting the atoms with each crack and creak. Is the sound of crying trapped within the ice, the sound of failure ringing in society’s ears?
Breaths of this air sting, sharp and angular, stabbing ice pick wounds inside my nostrils, lungs, and heart. Offer warmth to a stranger, and melt the walls that keep empathy and compassion under lock and key. Am I safe to be vulnerable with society’s most vulnerable? Likely not, and so I ice my heart against the sadness, against the feeling of powerlessness. The economy and ecology of life are becoming a glacier, both far too massive to comprehend, and melting too quickly for us to dam the rivers. The offer rescinded as I averted my gaze from the unholy. The surface of capitalism mirrored with a glaze of subzero glass.
An Ice Age is coming - one where the metaphorical definitions get blurred, foggy. An ocean of confusion and shame, breaking levees and hearts as it progresses. Analogy after analogy, we have the ostrich buried in the sand, its whole body and long legs deep in the dirt. Earthquakes rumble when our subconscious stirs, the fear of waking up to this reality too soon, too quickly, too far gone to know we ever left.
When the dawn of a new age breaks the crest of the frozen waves, will the levees fail, flooding the cities and towns, or will they just freeze us in our sleep? A merciful way to go, compared with some alternatives. The shadows of history looming in the darkness, our footsteps taking worn paths through time, and time again. The wind sighing deeply, its belly laugh seemingly cynical and cyclical. History repeating itself in slow motion, zoom out and examine the timeline of ages. Where has the temperature dropped? Is our lack of effort to stop climate change a subconscious drive to keep us all from freezing with the ineffable cold? We fear the arctic edges lining our possible futures.
Standing in this alley, I began my night with thoughts of beauty, the freshness of snow covering the filth of urban life, sparkling stars and frozen lights. Standing in this alley my mortality caught a chill, the cold tried creeping through my boots, it knocked at the windows and begged to come inside. My imagination has toyed with this concept of ice and the potential lives stoking coals in order to stave off an early death. I do not have an answer, nor have I alleviated myself of the guilt I feel as a fellow human being, frozen into paralysis. Plates of ice slip down the interior panes, my sight impaired by water in several ways. Tears won’t freeze the same as rain, the salt keeps it from occurring. Staying salty, to resist the tragedy of living as a human in the world of civilization.
Iced, like coffee and cake and airplane wings and tea and roads and noses. Iced, like ages and eons and millions of years of time. Iced, like my heart against the savageness of being human.
Work Cited
Scott, Michon. “What's the coldest the Earth's ever been?” Climate.gov, 18 Feb 2021, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-coldest-earths-ever-been#:~:text=Striking%20during%20the%20time%20period,until%20roughly%2011%2C000%20years%20ago.
Saucy, Daniel. “State of Homelessness: 2024 Edition.” endhomelessness.org, https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness/.
