While I was reviewing some of my correspondences, I came upon this draft email that I composed to myself in a brief moment while I was in Victoria last August. I want to say I was wearing shorts and sandals and a t-shirt with something cool printed on the front. But the fact of the matter is that I had pried myself away from my vacation to write a test in a desperate bid for a communications job, so I was probably wearing jeans and a hoodie. And panic, which I gushed out in my prosaic approximation of poetry.

August on Vancouver Island is too good to be true, and I guess I knew that all too well:

You know it’s coming.

It’s going to be January soon enough. No, January has been uncommonly warm for the past couple years. There’s a bright period that feels almost like spring. It’s gonna be February. February is when the real cold comes. When the hope that March will bring an early spring is condensed into a black jewel of desperation by the sheer weight—the unfathomable pressure—of the soulscarring cold.

The seeped-in feeling of feelinglessness. Locked-in. Snowed-in. Tractionless. Pointlessness.

The lifeblood of the earth turned to dust and cast to the ground. Burying us.

In retrospect, I should have spent the morning at the park.