The sky, flat and grey, like a lid over town. Haven’t seen the sun it feels like for months. Every ray of light straying from the clouds is a shock to the system, people freeze and look around with something like astonishment on their faces; what is this strange phenomenon? It must be the lack of vitamin D that brings forth this feeling of meaninglessness. Or, it could be, the lack of snow. December so far is dark and snowless, bloodless, like a dried up spinster bitter for the life she didn’t dare to live.

I just passed that statue on the park outside the hospital. During summer she looks confident and celebratory, standing naked and victorious in the lush greenery, and usually during winter, the fallen snow makes her a little hat and scarf, it is not hiding her nudity, but seemingly softening the cold. Now, naked and bare, dainty brass feet on the dead grass, hands held in some kind of prayer in front of her chest, she just looks pitiful and beseeching, awakening something dark and sad and empty within me. I turn my face away, pick up the pace and walk in the opposite direction. Like turning my face away from those beggars outside the supermarket; the void within me grows a little bigger each time.

I’m following the river, looking, yearning for that open space I know to be somewhere behind the trees. As I walk, dusk moves in from behind, staying closely to my back - I know I will have to face darkness on my way back home. As I step out from the trees I’m greeted with faint signs of actual winter - a white carpet of frost decorates my path and the rotting logs at the side of the road have paused in their decomposition. And, as if by magic, that hollow void inside of me somehow turns into a kind of pleasurable ennui.