The End of Winter.

(warning: content not suited for everyone. It may darken your day)

A wet puddle sky morning, mirroring bleakness, a still pool dripping gray. No daylight. Dead frozen branches reaching black cracks above, suspended clotted veins dried out and ready to break. A crow laughs waiting for the departed. Wrappers riddling the streets sprout like urban flowers as the dirt brown snow recedes revealing their accumulated presents.

One of the lowest times of the year: everything dead, slushy, and sloppy, in need of a car wash. Footprints track mud and salt into the house. Gray days. Nothing stirs and it is the kind of cold nobody wants to be in, still hiding, wishing they could linger in hibernation until the sun dries out the Earth, wanting to sleep through the gloom without swallowing all the medications at once.

Surviving winter is surviving yourself. If the cold doesn’t get under the skin, or the heating bills burn through the wallet, or the slick black ice on the roads, it’s the cooped-up lack of vitamin D that can drive a person into the darkest mental abysses, with no sign of light at the end of the tunnel.

That’s what kind of day it is: bleak with the freezing rain over my car window. A nice thick layer of fuck you, courtesy of winter.

Sadness like an asphalt pothole filled with tears and floating cigarette butts.

Nowhere for the water to go.

Nowhere for the winter to end.

May the sun return one day.

Original oil painting, "The Dead Do Mourn" 2018