The Fifteen Years I Have Been Thawing
I woke up the morning of my fortieth birthday on December 10th to the crushing sensation in my chest I had had since contracting bartonella from a dog bite a few years earlier, that felt like a vise. The sink was piled with dirty dishes downstairs. The atmosphere was an anvil on my chest. I had planned to celebrate my birthday with my lover the next day, mainly because I wanted to play the birthday messages from friends to myself without being yelled at. I was so weak that day, somehow managing to take quick pics of myself with “40!” written on a Post-It, then collapsing on the big organic mattress in my living room.
Over the next few days, I would get yelled at repeatedly by my then-lover (it always happened) who had barely finished the four-hour drive to my house before the roads began to grow impassable. As soon as the sounds of ice freezing and cracking were replaced by thuds of branches and trees, the power went out with a kind of finality I was not used to despite going through several Nor’Easters. It knocked out my electric heat and well pump when I had no working generator, and then we finally got a tiny one from a benevolent Quaker that could only run one space heater at a time. We both had dangerous symptoms of hypothermia by the time we got it. It would be called the worst ice storm in thirty years.
