Flake

The blurry snow of Toronto

Snow piles inside squares where trees without limbs relax and wait for the spring. Flakes fall, they say, each with an entirely different molecular structure. From a distance you would never know. From a distance, the broad shoulders of a man may not speak to the soul that exists inside.

Did you know that before homo sapiens there were neanderthals and they, too, buried their dead. They made their way through crevices, deep into the caves where some would say that their paintings spoke to an understanding as great as our own today.

I wonder if they might have had paper. What would have been said? What could have been saved? Where did the concept of God come from?

Likely the animism in nature, that the spirit of something beyond flesh exists within all that lives, both animate and inanimate. And others would argue that this came from the ritualistic nature of the hunt.

Imagine men circled around bones from a former killing, asking the life still inside of these to carry them through the next hunt. Imagine a captured animal killed and asked the same questions and how this might turn into prayer and altars and talismans.

Now imagine a square of snow in downtown Toronto. The city of cranes. Each corner a bastion of progress. We reach higher. For more. To fit. The sky becomes a view. The birds, they sit on bare branches. They sing outside a red birdhouse on Young Street. We have names for everything. 

Look at the pile inside the square and the next pile and how all of these piles look the same. We want to be these piles, to hold tight to those around us and hope that by existing together our individual survival has a greater possibility.

Yet within this there is the need to be seen, for the passerby to look within the pile and know that there is something special about the way that flake is shaped. There is something in this one that will prolong life, that will stop the melt.

The sun will come out.

The sun knows.

The conversation begins like this. 

We are the same but different. We are both weird. You go around and try to convince people that you are not weird because you want to fit in and be accepted. I go around and try to convince people that I am weird because somehow this makes me a little more special.

Like piss on a pile of snow inside a square on a sidewalk in Toronto. Frozen piss that goes unnoticed.

Yesterday, a man spoke so loudly on his phone you might have thought he was American. You might have thought he did it purposefully. You might have thought he needed attention. Like me.

From a distance of ten feet in front of him I took out my own phone. He would say, “We have to get on that as soon as possible.”

“As soon as possible,” I would shout.

And he would say more. Still loud. And I would say, “I’m very important. Do you know who I am?”

And the sound of him on his phone dimmed. And he may have turned a corner after a minute. 

And we laughed.

And then, inside of me, I imagined this man, walking down the cold sidewalk, past the bare branches and the cold squares of snow. I imagined his wife opening a door, inviting him in for dinner, for warmth.

And I knew the cold of my own street would be imprinted upon him, as he took off his jacket, as he sat, as the hot soup from the spoon touched his lips.

And I continued walking through the wind, across a bridge, under a highway, and to a street I did not know.