I opened the drawer and the winter was already inside it, three months now of the same pewter sky pressing down like a thumb on everything, the fire doing its work without enthusiasm, boots still wet from yesterday, the mountain stopped being a view somewhere in October and became a wall, and what no one tells you is that the body adjusts to cold long before the soul adjusts to the disappearance of light, dark coming at four and me letting it come, not surrender exactly but something past arguing, and I have been here long enough now to stop measuring this season against the one before it, to stop expecting the grey to lift and instead find what lives inside it, the candle smaller than the dark but warmer for being made rather than given, the wood stacked and that the whole victory of the day, your name written in frost on the glass and taken back before I finished the second letter, and I think this is what the people of the north learned across all their centuries in log and stone and candlelight, that you do not wait out the dark, you build something small inside it and you tend it
I like it but I think the line about the candle in the middle is out of place. I would deleting the candle line and making two sentences, with the split being after "what lives inside it."
>>25633935"I would think about deleting" is what I meant, sorry about the hinduism
>>25633937Yes, true, the candle smaller than the dark but warmer is already the whole thought, everything after the comma is the writer arriving late
>>25633940My issue with the candle line is more that it's directionally positive -- previous to that is a series of possibly positive symbols that go sour, but then there's the plucky little candle that's warmer than the reader expects it to be. So when I hit the line at first I have to put the brakes on to see if I'm reading it right after the previous few examples having conditioned me to expect a certain type of follow through that isn't in the candle line. So I get back on the ball, and now I'm kind of tense about if the next line is going to continue this way, if a series of positive surprises are going to be lead out for me instead of the previous negative surprises, but instead it seems like we're just in a different pattern of thought now.The candle line isn't a bad line on its own, but here it functions as a flow interrupt without some intentional related gesture after. Just a better sentence without it, as the cost in readibility isn't really paid back. That line could belong in another nearby paragraph, I imagine. It's not like the meaning of it is out of place, just the manner of delivery is kind of contrary.
