In the Depths of My Winter, An Endless Void.

I stand in my robe, fresh out of the shower, and stare down into the barren courtyard three stories below. The morning feels suspended in time, like a photograph. From the sanctuary of my apartment, the forbidding weather feels abstract, like a scene from a movie. Like this is not real life. 

Powdery snow collects along the rusted metal bars of the fire escape. In the distance, beyond the shadows of surrounding buildings, the sky looks complicated. Dark. Clouds gather low, the sun no longer visible. A storm is coming.

For four straight weeks, it’s snowed. March in New York is always bitter and cold, a far cry from the Gulf Coast. But over the years I’ve grown to love it. When it snows, everything goes quiet. The mechanisms of the City, otherwise unrelenting, stagnate. The stillness gives me time to think.

Carolyn’s potted Black Dragon plant remains on the window sill, in the exact spot it has for the past six months. Its piked foliage is verdant—  unusually lush for this time of year, despite the inconsistent-at-best care I’ve been providing it. The cycle of grief is a clever trickster. Elusive. His effect is disorienting. 

I have floated through the subsequent days and weeks after her murder like a ghost— most of the time I feel as if I am invisible. Death is isolating. And grief, a disease. The quarantine lingers.

I thumb the leathery, oblong leaves and watch the snow swirl outside. Vignettes from the past flicker like flashbulbs detonating inside the dark spots of my memory. 

The night after Carolyn was killed. Cop cars outside her apartment. Two patrols, and one van. Lights silently whirling an intense red and blue. How they conceived such quiet noise, as if the whole world had been placed on mute.

The neighbor’s chain-link fence, gate hanging loose off its top hinge. How it looked like a gapped front tooth, maniacal and taunting. 

Bright-yellow police tape barricaded the building’s front door and shattered glass glistened under the flashing lights. The patterns it made, scattered across the sidewalk—  a geometric explosion. A kaleidoscope. Irrevocably fragmented pieces, broken apart. Never to be put back together again.

The cracked-cement at the entrance, painted with large swaths of dark red.

Registering the stains were blood. 

My vomit, burgundy from the wine I’d had with dinner, layered on top of those awful stains. The crimson colors, a near-perfect match, blending together until I could no longer tell which was which.

Collapsing to the ground. Scraping my palms on rough, cold cement. Examining the abrasions that marred the fleshy part, where thumb meets wrist. The sight of my own blood pooling beneath those mangled fractured layers of skin. 

How I remained on the ground, legs no longer able to support the weight of my body until a uniformed cop came to where lay on the sidewalk. He said nothing as he hoisted my listless body up and carryed me in his arms like a child, to the back of the police van, where I could rest until the nausea had passed.

The summer before she was killed. Carolyn dressed in her taupe smock-dress and clogs, hot dog and a Coke, pushing an industrial size shopping cart through the Red Hook IKEA. Her tiny-faced watch with a thin black leather band, how she always wore it on her right wrist even though she was right-handed.

Her steering that heavy metal cart with purpose and determination. The gold from a singular chain around her neck, twinkling under the incessant glare from the warehouse lights above. It’s Sacajawea-sized charm, inscribed ‘I love you’ in flowery-cursive script, resting at the center of her sternum. That her bones were so delicate, clavicles like a baby bird, yet no one ever thought of Carolyn as delicate. Because she was the strongest person anyone who met her has ever known.

Carolyn, forever on a budget, tallying up what she was spending as we careened together through the labyrinth of aisles, stopping to debate the merits of a beige woven rug, furry throw pillows, sheer lace curtains, a glowing paper lantern. The perfect set of pillar candles to match a copper-tin she’d found earlier on the side of the road in downtown Brooklyn.

Her selecting new bed-sheets, a vintage inspired floral pattern— commenting how soft they were; holding the fabric to her cheek, saying it made her feel ‘girly, in a good way.’

Carolyn discovering the orphaned-plant, abandoned before check-out and placing the plant in her cart, nodding with satisfaction, stating as much to herself as to me how she liked ‘that it looks fake, but isn’t.’ 

That she had so much love to give, and always dispensed it on her own terms.

From the view at my window, I contemplate the plant’s survival but can’t quite make sense of it. Whether it matters that the plant is still alive when Carolyn is gone forever seems an impossible question to answer.

At the time, rescuing Carolyn’s plant seemed important.  A noble deed, to salvage something from certain ruin. 

Looking back, there are no noble needs. There is only getting by. No amount of good behavior will bring Carolyn back. No degree of sacrifice can ever fill that void.

The grief comes on slow—  creeping in late at night. It takes up residence inside my heart; stays hidden, insulated— expanding out with every labored breath on the nights I sob alone, crouched in a ball on the floor of my shower, water falling all around.

This intricately woven tapestry of our shared dreams, rendered a ghost that only I can conjure— that no one else can see. Together, anything was possible. Alone, I am a satellite circling the vestiges of what our lives were meant to become, and now never will. All that remains is an endless hollow of space Carolyn once occupied.

The snow falls harder now, gray clouds descending over the cityscape. I look closer at Carolyn’s plant to see new signs of growth emerging from the soil; its unfurling stalks tease that spring is only a few short weeks away. 

But this time of year, it seems winter will never come to an end.