It reminds me of our spring in Ft. Lauderdale, my eyelashes wet in the damp evening wind that rocked the palms and tangled my hair. Sorrow in the midst of revelry, a sunburned, weary dinner outdoors made foggy by talk of computers and business and future fortunes. Desire is the root of all suffering, said Buddha or someone equally all-knowing, and I desired huge, nebulous things I couldn’t verbalize, but which sat studying and unfeeling back in a dark, frosty city a thousand miles north. Two days later from the rusty seat of a carnival ferris wheel, I looked between various faded pink, orange, and green bulbs down at the campus and the Pittsburgh night, my white breath falling and rising in rhythmic rotations.

This desire hangs about me still, hovering like a cloud of gnats that trails when I walk and reforms when I pause to think. And so I find myself constantly running, the cloud following behind in a long, persistent string, waiting until I stop so it can reconvene about my head and continue the torment.

In my “all or nothing” attitude about life, from work to horses to hockey to love and back again, you are not exempt. It is all, or it is nothing to me, and it comes so close to nothing now that I want to scream at the top of my lungs when I am most alone, so that I can hear the despondency that echoes in cold hallways. In the falling snow on a fuzzy television, the weatherman points at some piece of me, buried and dead in an east coast winter I left behind.