collaborative storytelling that is equal parts critical and creative
We named you for cold things. Donner. You prance like a reindeer, lithe and sleek.
Your adoption coincided with a puppet operetta about the Donner party--a dark story of American history, one that symbolizes the profit-seeking, brutalizing basis of our founding. The singing puppets hit biting conditions. It’s so cold that members of the expedition freeze to death. Their companions eat their bodies to stay alive. You lick at my shoulders after I put on lotion. You nip at David’s hands until he plays with you. But we know that you’d never really devour your companions.
When we decided that you’d come to live with us, I thought you were too skinny to cuddle. “We have to accept that we have chosen a non-cuddly dog,” I said. I was wrong.
Now we joke that you have come between us, because that’s what you do, wherever we are. On the couch, in our bed. As the old adage goes, what did couples talk about two-thirds of the time before they got a pet?
You burrow under sheets. You writhe and strain until you fit perfectly. It is hard to make the bed with you in it. I make it anyway, burying you under blankets. I think it’s very funny.
Sometimes I’m self conscious about how much I love you and how openly I declare it, because I always thought it was most important to direct my love and attention towards people. You are a distraction from all that, from human injustice, from human connection, and I think now I am okay with that. Sometimes I need to be quiet, with you. Only after quiet can I turn my attention back to the difficult human matters that matter to me.
You are anything but cold, anything but prickly and angular. I’ll have a kid someday but I’ll already know what it means to take care of a loved one because of you. There is something reassuring about caring for those you love and feeling cared for in return.
You unconditionally want to be next to me, accepting the warmth of my body, for no reason except to be in the place where you are most comfortable. To be home. Because of you, I’m home, too.
Climate: a pattern of weather spread across 20-30 years.
This year marks my twenty-fifth revolution around the sun. This year, I become a climate.
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The month I was born, the Earth had 358 parts per million of carbon dioxide in its atmosphere. We had already passed what scientists say is a livable limit of 350 parts per million in 1990. It will have passed 410 ppm by the time I turn 25.
In late January 1994, the year I was born, much of the midwest and the eastern US was overtaken by the North American Cold Wave. The US had its coldest month since 1934. In Chicago, where I was born, the coldest temperature hit negative twenty-one degrees.
Twenty-five years later, in late January 2019, another North American Cold Wave hit, and I spent what felt like three straight days inside waiting it out. This time, Chicago’s coldest temperature reached negative fifty-one with windchill.
Cold is normally thought of as lack, but any extreme has its own gravity. When I woke up that morning, winter’s muted calm felt eerily amplified. I watched the empty streets from my window, loud with absence, the shared understanding that we couldn’t go outside. And the cold watched us back, from this vacuum of public space. An extreme weather event with no need for crowd control.
I waited until nightfall to leave my apartment, as if waiting out the worst of a storm. In what was left unfrozen of Lake Michigan, the waves were still very much alive. They tumbled towards the city in high, dark roils, heaving onto the wave breaker, which was already completely coated in thick ice. I couldn’t tell where the solid shore’s sand would have ended and the liquid water began.
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Birth: a story my mother tells me every year.
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I was born two minutes before midnight, on New Years’ Eve, 1994, in the Cook County hospital in Hyde Park, Chicago. I was a C-section, and I almost died. Actually, I was medically dead: I had an Apgar score of zero, after a rare condition starved my brain of oxygen for a prolonged time. A doctor named Deepa acted at a critical moment to keep me alive. The doctors thought I would live with chronic brain damage, but after my mother took me off medication, my brain healed itself. Every year I write Deepa a letter that says, thank you for saving my life. She lives in Atlanta now, and the last time I saw her was the summer after graduating from college.
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Those three days stuck hiding from the cold also meant I was stuck inside of myself, which was stuck in the Anthropocene. I walk amid this shifting map, I breathe in its tainted particulates. Climate is pervasive, intimate. There is nowhere else to go: I was born here, and I will die here.
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“I feel like I am emerging from a hibernation, a fog,” I wrote I my journal after it was all over. “Coming down from a drug, coming back from a trip, waking up after dreaming, greeting the sun after a long night.”
When the cold left us and we re-entered our lives, it felt like entering a new landscape. Surviving that was a different kind of birth: a familiar shock. The kind of shock that would only become more familiar.
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Seasons: a story the Earth tells us every year.
Winter’s light flashes off of the white snow and fills your cheeks. You think of yourself in terms of your extremities: your very existence is extreme.
I never used to dread winter until I moved to Chicago. Winter’s slowness is its usefulness. Capitalism, the other weather of the Anthropocene, already prevents this kind of cyclical rest, and it’s made all the more clear during winter. In the city, the greyscale’s tempo is vertical, not horizontal. There is no wide open field to look out onto; the lake’s tundra is an untouchable void, not the kind of distant melancholy that could be helpful.
The city, like New Years Eve as a holiday, is a constructed significance. We build them near water, but we still build them. When I was born, only my body was there to make memories. The Earth remembers winters with snow, and these are memories I will hold onto as each winter, dead leaves skate against dry, dead grass. Without the seasons, I don’t think we would know who we are. Each new season, each new year, a familiar shock.
But memories are far from stagnant; they shift each time you remember them. The body weathers as it gets older. The body, whether or not it gets older. The body, a heat wave. The body, a cold snap. Leave my bones in the ground; the ecology depends on me. I am already in process. I am not subject permanent, I am object impermanent.
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Temperature does not get old. It always comes back, but some numbers won’t. What if the seasons forget themselves? Generations born now without knowing average temperatures. Generations born now into slow amnesia, seasons distorted, seasons buried. I tilt my head back to stare into the clear white sky of winter, snowflakes tickling my eyelids. Cold, you raised me. Cold, I will miss you.
For me, New Years is a vortex. For the whole month of December, I dread my birthday. Or I dread the end of the year, or the coming of the new one, or dread my self having to pass through this imaginary boundary. The liminality is hoarded, heavy and lasts for days, weeks. The air is made of falling snowflakes, like tiny buds, teeming with the anticipation of change. In their sparkle, the promise that the year has been leading up to something. A landscape in waiting, burrowed with slow heartbeats.
Every year, the opportunity to look out onto what used to be an open field white with snow, like a blank canvas.
Every year, remembering what it means to live through a polar vortex. We don’t get a new year, we get a new climate.
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To weather: to discolor or disintegrate. To age, endure.
They say forged in fire, but the cold remakes you, too. Forge also means to fabricate. My body’s violent shivers force me awake, trick me into adrenaline. My body is something I cannot control.
The seasons have never felt so fake. Several times throughout the year, I have to stop and remind myself what season it is.
For the last day of the year, I hope for restoration. I take in this last day as if everything will disappear overnight – and it can feel like I do disappear, suspended in that two-minute window when I was born, as one year ends and the other begins. The moment is mine and not mine; the seconds are counted down in crescendoed shouts. But there is something no one can measure, the anticipation an oblivion.
The last day of the year is a slumping pile of snow on the curb, flecked with dirt, fingers of oil-slick melt streaming slow and out.
Whether: used to denote options, considerations, the inconsequential conditions of at least two paths based on opposites. As in “I’m here whether/weather you like it or not."
Waking up on the first day of the new year feels like zipping open your tent after you came in too late the night before to see anything of the mountain. All of the shapes were abstract in the dark, a landscape waiting to be restored by your presence. Now the light hits you, permission for surroundings to be new again. New Years Resolutions are, above all, permission to be new. (Weather permitting.) How do you want yourself to change in the new year? And this, without our permission: How do you expect the temperatures to fluctuate this year?
The secret to intentions is that it’s always a new year, whenever you need it to be. It’s not that nothing ever changes, that you don’t get to be a new person; it’s that you don’t always get to decide the timescale. I can’t depend on the weather to restore me, or the landscape to hold me.
When I think of my future now, it just looks like a black cloud. There is no sky, just an overhang. (I will be 41 in) 2035: x many deaths caused by drought, heat waves, tropical storms. (I will be 56 in) 2050: x lives lost from sea level rise. How deep does the present go? Does hope, courage have a temperature? The calendar is just a graph now, each new year a birth and a death. A release into the atmosphere, into the soil. Our bodies, an atlas. The weather, I know, is not waiting for us to restore it back.