When we met, sometime in autumn, our friendship came easy. We were both strangers in a foreign country, both somehow alone in a place so full of people. There was comfort in being lonely together.

At least once a week I would cycle over to her tiny house and we would climb to the roof, where we would sit and talk about whatever passed through our heads. On the days we had nothing to say, we simply stared at the sky.

When winter came, I would still sometimes walk or cycle through the snow to her house, and after she had put on every article of winter clothing she owned, we would head up to the roof.

One day, as she got changed, I saw an open book on her tiny coffee table, and without thinking, I read the handwritten page it was open to, closing the book once I’d finished.

There was kind of this little room under my house that was always nice and warm. It was like a tiny basement, but the previous tenants had made it into a little bedroom/hide-away. I had this bad habit of heading down there and sitting around, just listening to music or reading a book whenever it got kind of cold or windy, or if I just didn’t agree with the weather that day. Actually, even when the weather was good, I spent a lot of time down there.

But a little while ago I found that the little room under my house was slowly losing the warmth I was so familiar with. At first I just wore a sweater whenever I went down there, then a coat over the top of that, and eventually a scarf and a beanie, too. Then I started noticing a general change in environment. I could hear water slowly dripping from the roof, and my breath seemed to freeze before my eyes. A few days after that, I noticed some stalactites on the roof, and a thin sheen of ice covering the walls.

The problem is, I can’t stop going to that little room, even though every day it gets colder. I’m still so used to it being my little hideaway that I can’t seem to bring myself to stop. Even when I take books down and the pages stick together. Even though I can’t sit down anywhere because the cold causes an ache through my bones. Even though the build up of ice has made the room tiny and claustrophobic.

So now I just stand around in that little room, wishing for the days when it felt more like home. I shiver, I shake, and my teeth chatter uncontrollably, but still, I refuse to let go. I stand in there, the air cold and painful in my lungs, and I tell myself, in a voice no louder than a whisper, that those days will return.

But every day it gets a little colder, and every day my voice gets a little smaller.

And it dawned on me — one day it will get so cold in that little room that I won’t be able to open the door anymore.

And when that happens, what side of it will I be on, I wonder?

When she came back, she caught me staring blankly out the window. She was smiling and said, “Hey, what’s up?”

I shook my head. I smiled like I felt I was just this close to understanding something, and I said, “Nothing, nothing,” pausing momentarily before asking, “Hey, do you want to go on a road-trip sometime?”

She laughed, hidden amongst her scarf and her beanie and her coat over her sweater, and she said yes.

And as we sat up on the roof — chatting, laughing, and sharing silence — I knew that somewhere faraway, under a house I’d never seen before, there was a little basement room that I’d made just a little bit colder.

“Do you miss her?” she asked, the both of us staring out at the falling snow.

I nodded. I said, “…yes.”