Fall

It was cold.

I had been wearing a plain white T-shirt earlier in the bright sun of an Eastern Seaboard fall. They don't do Fall in the Middle Colonies, really. Just hot, then cold. If you live by the sea, your life is determined by cycles of currents and climates you may never see. The Atlantic hates people. It has dealt with expansionist humanity for so long its disgust pours out in abstract weather patterns and bitchy little hurricanes.

I lived next to the Atlantic. The Atlantic decided to be cold. In the space of my twelve hour shift, the sky turned clear and the waters froze. I looked up into the cold from the mildew riddled concrete of the CALA. The stars were arrayed as clearly as I ever saw them back East. The cold chased away the smog. Dippers and warriors and lovers scorned were snapshots of the human condition manifested in the original Rorschach.

I packed up my guys and our tools into the ordie truck after the watch was set on our live ones and we went back to the shack. She was waiting there to take me home.

I don't mond the cold. I find it invigorating and affirming. She shivered, she had no insulation against the humid, icy atmosphere. I opened one side of my field jacket and let her squeeze in next to me. She took a deep breath with the coat over her nose. She loved the smell of jet fuel and nitrates. After she smelled it, she settled into me a little deeper. I waved to the flightline gate watch. Her little hand poked childlike from out of my coat to wave. He giggled in a way men with rifles rarely do and reciprocated.

Later, in our little shitty apartment, she was laying in bed. Though it was cold, our clothes found themselves lost and crumpled in the floor. I had needed a drink of water and returned to our little slice of temporal attained conglomerate bliss. We always got along when I was set to leave soon. I tripped over the packed seabag in the doorway. When I crawled into the bed and pulled the covers up, her icy body clung to mine and her face burrowed deeper into my chest. I could hear her internal little girl seeping out through the grown up she tried to be.

"You're always so WARM."

I love Fall.