“Now, get to sleep,” Mama says. “So you can get your own boney arse out of bed. I’ll be too knackered to kick it out.”

Winter descends into a sort of perverted beauty. Once we chucked out the Christmas tree and burned the remnants of reindeer wrapping paper and made peace with the fresh evidence of our familial dysfunction, I settled into the desolation. The doldrums. The depression. The disappointment. All of the neurotic afflictions that start with the letter D. There is comfort in all that, and in the pristine whiteness that envelops the land. Everyone and everything is silent and slow now. There are also big icicles forming along the busted eavestrough of the trailer that look like penises. Perverted beauty. I want to snap one off and bring it to Char because I know she’d make a comical show of eating it, but I can’t because she’s too much in her madness. I want to smoke a joint and call Allie to tell her about the valance of phallic formations so we can both laugh and come up with other half-baked ideas for what to do with them, but I can’t because they kept her in the hospital once she admitted that she was scared she’d hurt herself. And misery doesn’t really love company. I want to talk to Willy so he can tease me and make me laugh, but I can’t because he has his own life and drama that doesn’t include me.

The fleeting appreciation of snow blankets and silence and dicksicles is no match for the quagmire of coldness and sickness and stuckness. I’m tired of trying to laugh but wanting to cry. I’m tired of hosting the relentless head-pounding, gut-turning, limb-numbing party that Parry Homunculus, Ziggy Stardust, and Fuzzy Wuzzy are throwing in my head. Mostly, I’m just tired.

February looms. I shuffle around the trailer looking for distractions. I stare out the window at the snow, at the trees, at anything my lazy eyes land upon. Which is pretty much limited to snow and trees. Every now and then, a crow or a chickadee or a blue jay comes along, scrounging for something to sustain its fragile winter existence. But when there’s nothing to be found, they fly away, and I’m back to staring at the inertia of nature. Nothingness is a shitty diversion. So I stare at my phone a lot. Rereading old text messages. Scrolling through Facebook posts of people I don’t care about, as if relationship statuses going from “in a domestic partnership” to “it’s complicated” matter. As if sexy filtered pictures of Asian fusion ab-buster kale noodle salad bowls for breakfast matter. As if memes for “classy ladies who drink and say fuck a lot” matter. The noisy static of other people’s fake lives in motion is a pretty shitty diversion, too. So I shuffle, stare, and drink tea. Shuffle, stare, drink tea. Maybe I’m already dead and just don’t know it yet. This seems like the kind of shit a ghost would do in limbo.