don't i know you better than the rest?

Time flies and it flew and suddenly it's almost winter again. I know that days and weeks and months and whole seasons passed, and feelings changed, and memories were misremembered, and everything burst green and blue before fading and falling away again, but last night I stepped outside and thought the fog was snow and the sight was only all kinds of familiar and no sorts of surprising.

Spring and summer were spent lost and in school, and fall was spent away, and so the reappearance of winter doesn't feel so much like a reappearance but rather like a reunion after a weekend apart. That tiger is back and glowing brighter than ever and he's guiding me home like all those times before and winter is not mine but this city is and it never feels more like home than in the winter.

When I think of this house and this street and all those other streets, too, everything and everyone and everywhere appears against a backdrop of the whitest snow and the brightest sun bouncing off that white snow or against a navy sky and one yellow moon. Maybe it's because so much growing and changing and losing and gaining were condensed into this season one year ago. Maybe. I feel like everything that mattered and that I can even begin to express can be traced back to this time in this city and so maybe that is why winter feels like home to me.

But as familiar as winter is, I realized how much has changed since a year ago when I passed him on the street this weekend with a new girl hanging off his arm in a way I never did. He looked away before I could realize who he was and what was happening, and I may have cried on what felt like the longest walk home, but it all cemented that he is past is past is past and it is a new winter and that winter was before and this winter is now. And last week I hung off another arm but that's all it was when last winter it would have been so much more.