Winter Thoughts-Final

It was the finality of that experience to the north and my teacher that created a journey from St. Louis to Massachusetts during a snow-filled December that signaled new beginnings and a final ending. I had travelled by various means from the warm confines of my dorm room to Illinois, Philadelphia, Harlem, New York and finally to Massachusetts to understand that oxidation and reduction reactions were the manifestations of life just as they were the undertakers of death. I had experienced so many tests of my own faith and tenacity through a journey in Philadelphia that included three nights circling a mountain with another snowstorm that laid claim to my life.

I had been given a coat in Illinois and dried out the pink Converses which were frozen to my feet by the constant walking through the snow. In Harlem, I found a homeless shelter where I extracted the Converses for the first time to see the damage of winter realities in the near blackened toes and partial blackened foot coverage on both feet. As I put the knurl of frozen toes and feet into a warm bath, primal screams escaped through lips and pores as a life and death struggle engaged in battle with neurological pathways unthawing for the first time in over a week.

The pounding of the bathroom door echoed in the pounding of winter thoughts and frozen body part realities in the warm waters of life. One look at the devastation of my feet and my body was all it took to grab a phone and make a life call, which I stopped with imminent pleadings of purpose and destination to someone who could take my medical concerns to heart and deal. I was given oversized clothes and plastic fireman boots to ease the pain of my continued unthawing and placed on a Greyhound bus to complete the almost 3,000 mile journey that had started in my dorm room.

The connections were made and then winter carved the etchings of pneumonia in my chest and created disconnect. Within that week, I was turned around to face my winter thoughts and "her." January was a blur and so were finals. She had hung on so far through my life trek to save hers. And then in the blinking of a February morning as the sun peeked mischievously around the shower curtain, she was gone. As I stood in the shower barely breathing, I felt her presence and her embrace as her spirit circled my soap covered flesh and held my breath in hers. For our final winter thought together, she came to me as her final gift. I knew that she had already left her body as she clung so lovingly to mine. I held onto her spirit as she held onto me. And then like the flicker of a moment past, the essence of "her" was gone and I was left curled at the bottom of a soapy tub clinging to what had been left of her in my heart.