You Know the Beauty of Cold; I’m Still Learning

COLD:
I grew up in the silence of winter.
The still kind of cold,
the kind that creaks the trees at night
and lays a hush over the world so thick
you can almost hear the snow settle.
It taught me how to listen.
How to endure.
How to know the difference
between solitude and loneliness.

HEAT:
I was raised where the sun seeps into everything.
Where walking barefoot meant burning soles
on molten bitumen,
and where silence was always filled—
with cicadas, with sweat,
with the distant hum of a fan that didn’t quite reach you.
I didn’t learn stillness,
but I learned how to keep moving
when your body wants to stop.

COLD:
That’s the difference, isn’t it?
For me, motion was a choice—
a way to keep warm.
Stillness was where the meaning lay.
The long white landscape, the blue sky emptied of moisture,
a kind of stark clarity.
It pares life back to its essentials.

HEAT:
And for me, stillness was surrender.
The heat pressed in—
in trains with stuck windows,
in offices without air.
Movement was survival.
Stillness, when I found it, was resistance
or exhaustion.
Not a gift.
Not clarity.
Just sweat.

COLD:
You speak of heat
like I speak of cold.
With respect.
But also wariness.
It shaped you from the outside in.
But I wonder—did it ever
hold you?

HEAT:
Sometimes.
In the soft breath of an evening breeze
after the sun gives up.
In a swim that cools your whole body
like being made new.
But mostly, heat was something I absorbed.
Cold—I’ve only ever visited.
It feels like being corrected
in a language I don’t speak fluently.

COLD:
That’s fair.
Cold is honest.
It doesn’t flatter.
It shows you your limits,
and then waits to see what you’ll do.
But it also gives gifts—
breath made visible,
sunlight on snow,
the strange warmth of a well-sealed room
in the heart of winter.

HEAT:
And heat, too, has its offerings—
the wild, open laughter of summer,
fruit in abundance,
even the absurdity of sweating together
on public transport.
There’s a strange intimacy
to shared discomfort.

COLD:
And there’s a kind of aloneness
to shared silence.
Not isolation—
but presence.
A knowing that the world is vast
and you are small,
but held nonetheless.

HEAT:
We come from opposite worlds,
but I see now—
they both invite awe.
Yours through stripping down,
mine through saturation.
And neither one is home to all,
but both are worthy of reverence.

COLD:
Maybe being in the world
is less about what shapes us,
and more about how we notice the shaping.
You carry warmth.
I carry stillness.
And maybe between us—
there’s a kind of balance.

HEAT:
Yes.
Maybe the truest knowing
is not to claim mastery,
but to remain a visitor.